Ripple Effect
by nonadhesiveness
Summary: Lunch with Will was only meant to take an hour. Brother and sister. Nice and normal. "But that's not us, right?" (Set after S4.)
1. Writer's Note

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my MSec project!

**About this Story**

The idea for this story first came to me in August 2018, though it was only rudimentary back then, and the story now bears very little resemblance to that original snatch of a thought. I started planning the story in November 2018, and I've been working on it every single day since, barring being forced to take time off for major surgery—though I did of course take my notebooks with me into hospital, perhaps a little optimistically hoping that I'd be able to do some work whilst I was there or at least distract myself from the fact that I might not have had the opportunity to finish this story. I could easily spend another year, if not longer, rewriting and developing this piece. There are plenty of things I would do differently if I were to start afresh, and I'm aware that the way I chose to write this piece and the scenes I used to tell the story are just one of an infinite number of possibilities, but I think if I were to take another year, the moment may have passed, and without taking a blank document and starting from the planning stages again, I feel like I'm just shuffling words around the page. Given that I don't have the luxury of being able start a new draft, I think I need to accept that the piece is as good as I'm going to get it given constrains of time and current ability. The perfectionists amongst you will understand how much that frustrates me. I hope that this version of the story is still enjoyable, even if it's not the best version.

The starting point is the end of season 4, and I haven't watched season 5 yet, so it's pretty much AU from there.

I give times/dates in this piece. If the chapter starts without a date reference, you can assume it's set on the same day as the previous chapter.

**A Note on Triggers**

I'm not a fan of trigger warnings, not only because life doesn't come with a warning (trite but true), but because I find triggers to be highly specific and what I think is triggering might not be triggering for you, and conversely, what I think is safe might trigger you. Most of my stories deal with grief and mental health to a certain extent, this one is no exception. That said, I think there is a good mix of light and dark overall, and I made a conscious decision to keep it roughly at the same level of detail as you'd expect to see on the show. If you have any concerns at any point, feel free to send me a message. I'll do my best to answer any questions, but at the end of the day, only you know what's right for you. Trust that.

**Language**

There are three F-bombs in this piece. You'll spot them, I'm sure.

I'm aware that I often use 'who' or 'whoever' when it should be 'whom' or 'whomever', but the grammatically correct version sometimes sounds clunky. Personally, I'd rather it be grammatically incorrect than wrench the reader out of the story. All other mistakes are due to ignorance or dyslexia.

**Reviews**

I'm more than a little concerned that I might have wasted a year of my life writing what's turned out to be complete trash, so reviews are most definitely appreciated. I'd love to hear your thoughts, which bits you like and which bits you don't, or just a quick note to let me know that you're still reading. Each review that lights up my inbox lights up my brain as well, and those little puffs of dopamine make it all worth while. Constructive criticism is always welcome too—I might spend a few months licking my wounds before I take it on board, but in the end, it'll help me improve.

P.S. You can find me on Twitter, and I'll be posting this piece on WattPad too.

**ⓐnonadhesiveness**


	2. Prologue

**Prologue**

**Elizabeth**

**Wednesday, 24th October, 2018**

**5:37 AM**

A dream is just a dream, but like the wind that swept across the twilit waters of the pool, it can send out ripples—ripples that, upon reflection, are insidious enough to make even the 90, 854 tons of marble, granite and bluestone gneiss of the Washington Monument quiver.

The dream hung in the periphery of Elizabeth's awareness as her feet pounded the concrete path that ran alongside the Reflecting Pool. The cool air blazed through her chest with each breath, and the _thudding _steps jarred through her ankles and shins. Like the scent of violet, the dream trace undulated, one minute so faint that it was almost as though it had never existed at all, the next drenching her in its suffocative smell until the blue-black darkness around her caved and the visions rushed in.

Concrete turned to a sea of grass; the plumes broke and billowed around her knees, the fronds brushed against the exposed skin of her calves, whilst hidden stones jabbed at her bare soles. The marble obelisk morphed into the trunk of a black walnut tree; its limbs branched up and crackled into the night like a lightning bolt striking the pyramidion. Then her body lurched. She was thrust to the cusp, and like the roots of the tree—half lodged in the earth, half extending out over the chasm below—her toes curled into the soil and her heels jutted out over the abyss. Her fingertips dug into the rough grooves of the bark. Her heart thundered against her ribs.

'_Take my hand_.' Outstretched fingers trembled as they sought her own. '_Take my hand.'_

She could do it: she could reach out, she could take his hand.

But what if she didn't? What if she stopped? What if she just let go?

Time stilled, and for a moment she floated. Waited, just waited. And the question hung in the air with her: Would she fly or would she fall?

Elizabeth halted so abruptly that the DS agents running behind her whipped past, and as the illuminations of the National Mall swam through her vision in a blur of giddy white lights, she doubled over and clutched her knees. She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in ragged breath after ragged breath—the air ravaged its way to the bottom of her lungs—and she waited for the echoes to die out.

_Take my hand. Take my hand. Take my_—

"Ma'am?" Matt's voice. "Is everything okay, ma'am?"

_Take my_—

Elizabeth let out a huff. She pinched the bridge of her nose, and then straightened up. She met Matt's eye, just for a flicker. "Everything's fine." Then she strode on, and shook the pins and needles from her fingertips.

Matt's frown lingered, but he said nothing, and when she eased into a jog, he fell back into line with the other agents around her.

She soon settled into the lulling rhythm of trainers thudding against the track, her even breaths burning through her chest, the warble of a bluebird anticipating the dawn.

When she reached the top of the pool, she turned back. The reflection of the Washington Monument projected like a path of white light across the surface, ready to guide her home.

But the wind gusted, the water rippled, and the edges of that path wavered. Concrete turned to grass. The branches of the black walnut tree groped like gnarled fingers towards the bleak pink blush of dawn. _Take my_—

"Let's pick up the pace."

And with that, she ran on.


	3. Chapter One: …vial of poison

**Chapter One**

**…****vial of poison.**

**Elizabeth**

**6:54 AM**

The cold yellow glow of the street lamps had flickered out when the sky groaned into daylight, but other than that the street was exactly the same as when Elizabeth had left it just over three hours before. All except for the grey, three-door hatchback with its tinted rear windows and the busted front bumper that had been patched up with duct tape which had seamlessly migrated fifteen metres further down the street—just as it had done every morning that week.

The breeze ruffled against the half-dried film of sweat that stuck to her skin, and its subtle sting crawled up to where the strands of her hair had escaped her ponytail and plastered themselves to the nape of her neck. A shiver delved deep into her shoulders, and caused them to tense. There was nothing unusual about the car itself, and perhaps it wouldn't have bothered her at all had it not looked exactly like the car she had learnt to drive in just a year after her parents' crash, tinted windows aside; the same car that Will had written off two years later, the summer before she went up to UVA. After all the effort she had put into keeping that beat-up old car running, after all the sacrifices she had made to care for Will and to make sure that at least he would keep some semblance of a childhood, and he went and tried to throw it all away in one stupid stunt. Of course, he walked away without a scratch: he always did.

Or perhaps, in truth, the car was just another distraction; a distraction that she would not have noted—would not have needed—had she not spent the last week running from that dream.

Elizabeth placed the powder pink pastry box she had picked up from the bakery down on the console table in the entrance hall—its ghostly reflection hung beneath the glass—and she thumbed through the pile of unopened letters. One of the envelopes bore the silhouette of a tree in the upper left-hand corner. She discarded the rest and carried bill from the stables along with the bakery box through to the kitchen. The slight chill that drifted in the air prickled at her damp skin.

She flipped the switch on the coffee machine, and as the machine clunked and then whirred into life, she padded through to the den and slipped the letter into her handbag where it slouched on one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Just another task to add to the list. It didn't feel like a month had passed since she paid the last fees, but what with the fallout from the nuclear de-alerting and now the ongoing talks with Russia over the Bering Strait Region, if she so much as blinked, she could lose a whole day.

"Hey."

Elizabeth startled, and the box containing the last muffin jumped from her grasp and clattered onto the table. She spun towards the couch, one hand clutched over her heart as it slammed against her ribs. "Jesus, Henry. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"

"Well, good morning to you too." Henry eased up to sitting and massaged his shoulder before stifling a yawn in his fist. He was still clad in his pyjama bottoms and an old National War College tee that had faded from too many wears and too many washes.

"Sorry." She leant over the back of the couch, and draping her arms around his neck, she pressed her lips to his temple and breathed him in. "Good morning." She ran one hand through his already disheveled hair as she drew away again. "I didn't think you'd be up this early."

"I could say the same about you." He stood up and stretched, and then followed her into the kitchen. His gaze clung to her, a jarring presence against the back of her neck while she poured two mugs of coffee from the pot. When she turned and handed him one of the cups, a pinch had nicked the middle of his brow. He took a tentative sip, his gaze never leaving her, and then he cradled the mug to his chest. "I make that at least four predawn runs in the past week."

She shrugged, and she hid her lips behind her own cup. "Need to fit the exercise in somewhere…unless you really do want me to have a heart attack." She sent him a sharp smile, but when he didn't return it, just continued to stare at her with that pinched frown, it withered like a daffodil that had blossomed in a false spring.

A knot gathered at the centre of her chest, and she brushed past him and retreated to the den.

"Elizabeth," he called after her, his voice harsh in the surrounding hush.

She set her coffee down on the kitchen table and ran her fingers along the edges of the cardboard bakery box.

"Elizabeth…we need to talk."

She turned her chin to her shoulder. "Well, that sounds ominous. Hope you're not thinking about trading me in for a younger model." It was meant to be a quip, but something in her tone dragged and the words strained from her tongue.

"I'm serious." The clunk of his coffee mug against the kitchen counter echoed through the room. "I'm worried about you. You're not sleeping, you're—"

_Take my hand_. _Take my—_

She pressed the pads of her thumbs against the corners of the box until they throbbed with a dull sting. "I bought the guys muffins from that bakery on the corner. There's one left—one of those walnut ones. I was going to save it for later, but if you wanted to…"

She trailed off as he stepped up behind her, his chest as close to her back as possible without actually touching, and something about that presence—there but not—made it all the more intimate, as though it primed her for his touch and heightened her senses. His body heat radiated through the pores of her running gear and washed over her; it felt like hot stones soothing away the tensions of a lifetime of running. Her eyes slipped shut. She could just give into it, let herself sink back and give into him. But, as a masseuse once told her, once those knots have been released, toxins flood the bloodstream.

"Elizabeth."

Her eyes snapped open, and she pressed herself closer to the back of the chair, expanding the pocket of space between them. Just enough to feel the brush of cool air, just enough to breathe once more. "Have you—" Her voice caught, and she cleared her throat. "Have you noticed that car that's been parked outside all week? The grey one with the busted bumper."

"No." He reached around her and plucked the box from her grasp; as he did so, his chest bumped against her shoulder, and she tensed. He pushed the box to one side and then skimmed his hands down the outside of her arms and laced his fingers through hers. His breath ruffled over the shell of her ear, and caused the back of her neck to tighten. "But I haven't been getting up at three AM each morning, I haven't been dragging the DS guys out on two-hour-long runs, and I haven't been buying them muffins to make up for it because deep down some part of me knows it isn't right to be asking that of them when they've been tasked with protecting me."

She squeezed his hands. "Henry…I'm fine." And then she let go and twisted around to face him. She met his eye with a forced smile. "Really. I just have a lot going on."

He searched her eyes as though he were scanning the fine print of one of those religious texts that crammed onto the bookshelves of their bedroom and imbued the air with their musty scent, as though he were looking for the truth between the lines, faith in the unwritten.

His look sharpened. A flash. "It's the falling dream again, isn't it?"

She pursed her lips, and dipping her chin, she broke away from his gaze. The strands of hair that had escaped her high ponytail swayed forward to frame her face.

He tucked the strands back behind her ear, and then let his hand linger there, his palm warm against her cheek. Too warm, too close. "Do you want to talk about it?" He swept his thumb over her cheekbone.

Her throat bobbed with her swallow. "It's not falling. It's like I'm on the cusp and maybe I'm flying or maybe I'm falling…I don't know…"

_Take my hand. Take my—_

She shook her head to herself, and then turned away from his touch, in need of the space. "But it doesn't matter anyway. It's just a dream."

She snatched up her coffee mug from the table and grabbed one of Alison's glossy fashion magazines from the pile on the floor next to the armchair, and then she settled on the cushions at the corner of the couch, her legs tucked beneath her. She flicked through the pages as she sipped on her coffee, but the images were just a blur of muted colours, the coffee a bland warmth on her tongue—only Henry, stood in the periphery of her vision with his arms folded across his chest and a frown heavy on his brow, held focus.

"So…you don't think it's at all significant that this dream comes back at the same time every year…or whenever you're worried about Will?"

Her muscles tensed, and the page she was turning snagged and ripped at the top, just next to the central margin. "I'm not worried about Will."

"Oh really…?" His tone drawled with scepticism.

She ignored him, whilst the tension deepened to a smouldering beneath her skin.

"So, the vivid dreams, the going out running at ridiculous hours, the spying on our neighbours and obsessing about their cars—"

The smouldering flared, too quick to smother. She chucked the magazine down onto the cushion so hard that it skidded across the fabric, spilled over the edge and crashed to the floor. She twisted around to face him. "I'm not spying, it's not ridiculous, and I'm not _obsessing_."

He held up his hands. "Hey. I'm just—"

"And you know what? I resent you trying to psychoanalyse me. I'm not broken or damaged, and even if I were, it's not your job to fix me. I'm your wife, Henry. Your wife. Not your patient, not your case subject, and certainly not some responsibility you have to deal with. So just fuck off."

The silence that followed rang out with a high-pitched whine and the words floated to the floor like flaming tatters in the aftermath of an explosion. Henry reeled, and his arms fell to his sides, his hands empty and exposed, whilst a sheen of hurt veiled his eyes.

She turned her shoulder on him, and taking sips from her coffee cup, she dulled both the throb of anger that pulsed through her bloodstream and the sting of guilt laced beneath it, as though the caffeine were an antidote to that particular vial of poison.

She shouldn't have said it—any of it. She was an ingrate. After all, how many people could honestly say their husband cherished and supported them like Henry cherished and supported her? He was only trying to help. She wished she could blame the outburst on lack of sleep—if only that wouldn't prove Henry's concerns to be well-founded—but in truth, it was more than that. There was something about his questions and his _analysis_, his insistence that he had godlike perspective when it came to her thoughts and feelings, that irked her; perhaps, in some small part, because it left her feeling as lost and as ignorant as she had done on that first day at Houghton Hall, when the school nurse had handed her a medical form and a rollerball pen and had left her with instructions to '_fill it all out_'. She was only halfway down the first page when she froze. There were all these questions about vaccination dates and family history and childhood illnesses, all these questions that she had never thought about and had no answers to and—now—had no one to ask. How long she had sat there, she couldn't say, but by the time the nurse came back, the ink had flowed out from the nib of the pen and spread across the page like a miniature Rorschach. God only knew what a psychoanalyst would make of that.

And now to have someone who knew her—someone who she could turn to for the answers—was a precious thing. But _having_ to turn to someone, being such a stranger to herself… It didn't make her feel more informed; it felt like cheating, and it begged the question: how much did she really know about herself—or anything—at all?

The cushion sagged as Henry perched beside her. Hunched forward, he held his head in his hands and ruffled his hair. A minute or two must have passed before he turned and looked at her, though the depth of that silence made it feel more like hours. When he did, the dark purple circles that drooped beneath his eyes spoke of his own sleepless nights. She had taken care not to wake him when she picked up her trainers and slipped out of their bedroom each morning, but that didn't change the fact that each morning she had found him awake upon her return.

She slid her hand across the cushion and bridged the gap between them.

He stared down at her gesture, as though examining the olive branch for hidden thorns. Then he looked up to her face again. Hurt still clouded his eyes.

She eased her hand closer still, and when he didn't pull back, she tangled her fingers through his. "Henry, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"

But he shook his head. "I shouldn't have pushed you."

"Even so. It wasn't called for, and it wasn't fair." She tugged at his fingers. "Forgive me?"

"You're my wife." He squeezed her hand. "I'll always forgive you." Then he leant back against the cushions and opened his arms to her. "Come here."

She plucked at the front of her running top, releasing a fresh sting of sweat, and she wrinkled her nose. "I'm all sweaty."

"Since when has that ever bothered me before?" His smile glimmered in his eyes.

She resisted an eye roll, and then tucked herself against his side, her head rested to his chest. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and as his scent and warmth infused her, she drew idle patterns over the cotton of his t-shirt, circles that expanded and softened as they spread further and further away from their focus.

He pressed a kiss to her crown, gathered her even closer to him, and rested his chin against the top of her head.

Her fingers stilled. "Maybe I am worried about this lunch with Will, about what he'll say…"

"You really think he'll be opposed?"

She pursed her lips. He might not like it—secretary of state had been a hard sell—but would he seriously say no? "I don't know. He never really liked being Lizzie Adams's little brother, but I'm guessing he'd take that over President McCord's little brother any day."

"I'm sure being the president's brother comes with some perks."

"Being Lizzie's brother had its perks too."

"How so?"

"If you're a fourteen-year-old boy at a co-ed boarding school, having an older sister in the girls' dorms is like having an asset infiltrate the highest levels of a foreign government. He thought he had an instant in with my 'hot friends'."

Henry chuckled. "Did it work?"

She drew away from his chest and arched an eyebrow at him. "What self-respecting sixteen-year-old girl would go out with a normal fourteen-year-old boy, let alone _Will_?"

He pondered that for a second, and then conceded it with a mouth shrug. "True."

"If I hadn't been there to convince them that he was pretty much harmless, he would've been known as Lizzie Adams's _pervy_ little brother."

He laughed. A moment later, his expression softened, and he squeezed her thigh. "You're a good sister to him."

She looked down at the coffee cup still clutched in one hand. "Yeah, well, try telling him that." Her gaze flicked up to meet Henry's eye. "You know the first thing he said to me when I told him I was taking this job? Not '_Congratulations_', or '_Is that safe?_' given what happened to Marsh; he just said '_Well, it had better not interfere with my work_.'"

His mouth tensed, and something in his eyes darkened. But then he shrugged and the darkness, or whatever it was, swept away again. "Things have changed since then."

"Exactly. We're finally in a good place, and if I do this—"

A door slammed upstairs and the sound juddered down through the walls of the house.

She glanced over the back of the sofa, towards the staircase, and then lowered her voice. "—if I run, everything will change again. For you, for the kids, even for Will. And I don't want to force that on anyone."

Henry stared down at where his hand rested against her thigh. Something about his expression, the gentleness around his eyes, reminded her of how they had sat side by side on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and how—in the heady glow of that artificial light—she had been so certain that she wanted to run. How long had passed since that night? And how much more complicated was the decision when illuminated by the veracity of dawn?

"You know it's okay for you to want this." He looked up at her again. "And if Will's not on board, that's his problem, not yours."

"But it is my problem, Henry. He's my brother. I need him on my side."

"So, if he asked you not to run…you'd seriously consider it?"

"After all the times I've gone on about putting family first…? Yeah. I'd have to." She sipped on her coffee and examined him over the lip of the mug. "You think I'm crazy."

He chuckled and shook his head. "Of course not. I think that there's a lot riding on your relationship with Will, and although I don't think it'll be an issue, I can understand why it's bothering you. Any change is difficult, it puts pressure on relationships, and this is a big change." He swivelled around on the cushion to face her fully, one leg folded in front of him, and he rested his arm along the back of the couch. "Let's say, hypothetically, that Will did have a problem with it. Would it really be so bad for you to put yourself first for once?"

"Yes." The answer came without hesitation.

He cocked his head to one side. "Why?"

"Because…" Her eyes bugged as she sought out her response. "It's selfish."

"And?"

"And…" She dragged out the word. "I don't want to be selfish."

"Why not?"

"Because…I just don't."

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Well, babe, I gotta say, if that's how you're planning on answering the questions in the debates, then I really don't think you have anything to worry about after all."

"Shut up." She swatted his chest, but the smile that tugged at her lips crept through.

He caught hold of her hand, pulled her close, and was just about to meet her with a kiss when footsteps thudded down the stairs like the chug of a freight train hurtling along the tracks.

Elizabeth turned towards the staircase just in time to see Stevie barrel down the last few steps into the kitchen. "Hey, baby."

"I'm not here, I'm not here." Stevie ditched her high heels and a pastel pink blazer on the bottom step, and then stuffed her blouse into her skirt and wrenched up the zip.

Elizabeth shot Henry a look before she returned to their daughter with a puzzled frown. "Um…okay? Then where exactly are you?"

Stevie wrestled on her blazer, flipped up the collar and smoothed it down. "I'm at the White House putting the finishing touches on the binder Russell asked me to prepare, which I totally did not forget about until he texted me twenty minutes ago saying he needed it ready by nine o'clock."

"Okay." Elizabeth passed her coffee mug to Henry, and then knelt up on the cushions and rested her forearms atop the back of the sofa. "Well, maybe when you are here, say this weekend, we could—"

"Can't." Stevie clung to the end of the banister and yanked on her high heels. "Russell's got a talk next week and he's asked me to put together the slides for the presentation. And if I mess that up, he will so fire me, that's if he hasn't already fired me today." She grimaced. "God, I'm so dead."

"Oh…" Elizabeth's smile drooped. She fought to revive it. "Well—"

"I've really gotta go." Stevie waved at her parents, blew them a kiss, and then dashed off through the kitchen. "Bye. Bye. Bye. Love you. Bye."

"Bye, baby. Love you," Elizabeth shouted after her.

The house tumbled back into silence.

Elizabeth pulled at the threads of the grey woollen blanket that draped across the back of the sofa. She let out an exaggerated sigh, and then slumped down onto the cushion and sent Henry a sideways glance. "It bothers me that our daughter spends more time with Russell Jackson than she does with me."

Henry shrugged, and then took a swig of her coffee. "She's got a job, babe, and a life."

"I know." She lowered her gaze from his, and instead she examined her fingernails and prodded at her cuticles as she spoke. "But one day _I_ won't be here, and I wish she'd spend a little more time with me before then."

A lull settled over them, and as it did, the ache of Stevie's departure deepened. It diffused through Elizabeth's chest like pressure on a bruise, and it expanded to fill every last inch of space, until space was no longer enough, and so it stretched out through time too.

"You missing them?" His voice was low, perhaps a little tentative after her reaction before.

She tweaked her lips to one side. "Always." Her gaze flicked up to meet his. "Especially all the things I never got to say."

He squeezed her thigh. "You know I'm here if you want to talk, and I'm here if you'd rather not. The same goes for the dream." He searched her eyes, and for one heart-paused second it felt like maybe he could see ripples of the images lurking in the blue. "Next time you can't sleep, wake me up and we'll go for a walk, and I promise I won't ask any questions if you don't want me to."

"Really?"

He nodded, and then he edged closer and cupped her cheek. He stared into her eyes. The hazel of his own eyes was rich and warm, and so forgiving, perhaps more than she deserved. "I'd rather spend all night walking the streets of DC in silence with you than waking up to find that you've gone." Then he pressed his lips to her forehead and lingered there.

She shut her eyes, and laid her hand against his chest, her palm flat to his heart. Its beat thudded against her, so steady, so strong. "What I said earlier—"

"Already forgotten."

"I do love you."

His lips curved in a smile against her forehead. "I know."

And then his touch vanished.

The cushions shifted as he rose from the couch, and she stared up at him with a puzzled expression when he offered her his hand.

He wiggled his fingers. "We've got a while before you need to head into the office."

"And you're planning to take advantage of that?"

"I thought we might see if I can't make you fly…" He tilted his head to one side, and a smirk blossomed. "…or was it fall?"

She snorted. "God, Henry, you're using my dream as a come-on? Seriously?"

"That depends. Is it working?"

She shook her head to herself and bit back her smile. _Such a dork_. Then she rose from the sofa and took his hand.

* * *

Thank you to everyone who has already left a review.

Any thoughts?


	4. Chapter Two: …permission slip

**Chapter Two**

**…****permission slip.**

**Elizabeth**

**1:16 PM**

The maître d'hôtel guided Elizabeth through the maze of tables and chairs towards one of the private booths at the far side of the restaurant. Every last seat in the dining hall was taken, and the clamour of a hundred or more voices soared to mingle with the clatter of cutlery and the clink of glasses in a cacophonous symphony that bounced off the vaulted ceiling.

"Nice of you to finally join me." Will slipped his cell phone into his inside jacket pocket.

"Sorry. This morning's been…well, hectic." Elizabeth sank into the seat opposite. She nodded when Will motioned to the carafe of water that stood next to the miniature manzanita tree centrepiece.

He filled a glass three-quarters of the way to the brim, slid it across the table towards her and then topped up his own. "Problems with the Russians?"

She paused, the glass to her lips. "Why? What've you heard?"

"Nothing, but isn't it always problems with the Russians?" He set the carafe down with a clunk that reverberated through the table. "Bravo on nearly annihilating the planet, by the way."

She opened the leather-backed menu and scanned down the list, though Blake had already printed off a copy and presented her with it as soon as the elevator doors had pinged open on the seventh floor that morning. "Do we really have to discuss that now?" She shot him a look over the rim of her reading glasses. "Or ever?" And then returned to the page.

"I just find it extraordinary that some people can devote their whole lives to saving others, and you and your cronies can destroy it within a matter of minutes. Really, bravo." And there was that smile of his, just one of the fourteen reasons why she'd had to learn to meditate.

She snapped the menu shut, and the flames of the tea lights housed in the glass orbs that adorned the manzanita tree swayed and flickered and threatened to blow out. "So, how are Sophie and Annie?" She took another sip of water, her gaze steady on Will. "I hear they've gone to London—without you."

Will's smile faltered, and though he fixed it within a fraction of a second, the glimmer in his eyes died. "Nice deflection."

She rocked forward and slid her hand towards him across the tabletop, the tablecloth rough and cool beneath the heel of her palm. But when he folded his arms across his chest and leant back in his seat, she wrapped her fingers around the tumbler instead. Too close to the bone? Or after decades of dulling the blade, was the knife not sharp enough?

"I'm serious, Will. Why didn't you go with them?"

"Excuse me, sir, ma'am." A waiter stepped up to the booth. "Are you ready to order?"

"Perfect timing." Will handed the waiter his menu. "Yes, I think I'll have the salmon."

_The salmon?_ Elizabeth did a double take. "Wait, what?" She turned to the waiter, one finger raised. "We're going to need another minute."

"Of course, ma'am." The waiter bowed his head and then backed away again and hovered near the wait station.

Elizabeth lowered her voice to a hiss. "The salmon? You hate salmon."

"Correction: I hate salmon done badly."

"When have you ever had salmon that you've considered done well?"

"I can order the salmon if I want to order the salmon." Will held her gaze, each word pronounced like a challenge.

For one long minute, they were kids again, squaring up across the monopoly board. _Hey! That was five spaces, not four. / I thought you were meant to be good at math, but you can't even count. / You started on Atlantic Avenue, which means you landed on 'Go to Jail'. / No, I didn't. I started on Ventnor Avenue. / Mom, he's cheating! / Am not! / Are too!_

Elizabeth held up her hands and leant back in her seat. "Fine, whatever, but when it arrives and you realise that you'd rather have whatever I'm having, I'm not swapping, not again."

"Fine."

Elizabeth tipped her head towards the waiter, and when he returned to the table, she handed him the menu. "He'll have the salmon, and I'll have the pasta."

"Certainly, ma'am. Anything else to drink?"

Elizabeth glanced at Will, and he shook his head. She looked up at the waiter. "We'll stick with water, thanks."

A glass—or three—of red would certainly take the edge off the meal, but who knows, she might end up signing away Alaska.

Chatter floated through the main dining hall like dandelion seeds buoyed on a summer's breeze, but in the booth the silence dragged with the weight of damp air. The flames of the candles that hung from the manzanita tree flickered; they wavered one second, and flared the next, governed by the whims of the unseen, proof of all that is felt but not known. She should have tired of these conversations long ago, yet something bound her and Will together in this push and pull, this struggle to fend off the darkness and to salvage even a glimmer of light. Were people any different from the candles on the tree, or were they just flames to the winds of fate?

"So, are you going to tell me what's going on with you and Sophie?"

"No."

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at him.

Will picked up his dessert spoon and studied it as he turned it over and over. "There's nothing to tell. Sophie had some time off, and they haven't been back in a while, so she's taken Annie to visit her family."

"And you didn't go with them?"

"I had to work." The spoon stilled and his gaze darted up to meet hers. "You know work. I might not be in charge of triggering nuclear holocaust, but I still think my job's pretty important. I might even be training the doctors who one day treat the people you nuke."

Elizabeth stared him hard in the eye. "Nice deflection."

He reflected the look back at her. "It's what we do, right?"

They paused for a beat, and then broke into simultaneous smiles.

A waitress approached the table, a wicker bread basket draped in an ivory napkin balanced in the crook of her arm. She peeled back the cloth cover and offered the basket to Will first, but he shook his head and raised the fingers of one hand, and so she turned to Elizabeth, who peered into the basket and then plucked one of the poppy seed rolls from amidst the nest of petit pains.

Elizabeth tore the roll apart, sending a spray of poppy seeds skittering over the side plate, and as she folded a chunk of the still-warm bread into her mouth, Will eyed her with a look that landed somewhere between amusement and disdain, his tongue poised, as though he was fighting to restrain whatever snark had popped to mind.

"What now?" she said through her mouthful. The fluffy bread melted on her tongue.

"Nothing." He dismissed her with a flap of his hand, but when she widened her eyes at him, he continued. "Just—bread and pasta? I didn't realise you'd taken up marathoning."

"You'd be feeling carby too if you'd had a morning like mine."

"I'm sensing it's more than just the Russians."

She paused to dislodge a poppy seed from between her teeth using the tip of her tongue. "Just one of those days." Though when was the last time it hadn't been _just one of those days_? She let out a soft snort and shook her head to herself. "You know I've been up since three AM every day this week, and I thought that maybe I could arrange something nice for this weekend just to give me the strength to drag myself through, but my own daughter—who I gave birth to, without an epidural I might add_,_ because she insisted on arriving during a snowstorm—would rather hang out with the White House Chief of Staff than with me; work has been non-stop and if I sit down for so much as two seconds, someone pops up out of nowhere with some new disaster that only I can deal with, and it needed to be dealt with five minutes ago, by the way; then I'm trying to get to the elevator so I can at least make it here on time and have a full hour's break from the office, when I'm pounced on at least three times by three different people all with some document or other requiring my urgent attention. Plus—" She she let out a long sigh. "—I gave Henry my muffin."

Will raised his eyebrows. "Is that a euphemism?"

She frowned at him. "No, _Will_, an actual muffin." She stared down at her napkin as she worried the off-white cloth between her fingers. "It was a walnut muffin and it had red bean paste in the centre, just like the hodu-gwaja the South Korean minister brings over from Seoul, and it had brown sugar sprinkled on top."

"I see." He raised his glass to his lips.

She gave another stream of a sigh. There was a reason why people would queue for over half an hour for the opportunity just to sample one of those muffins.

She dropped the napkin back to the table, and looked up at Will. "And _then_ I 'gave Henry my muffin'."

Will choked on his water.

Elizabeth smiled to herself. "I bet you wish we were talking about Sophie and Annie now."

Will was still blotting the spray of water from the front of his shirt and blazer when the waiter reappeared with their meals. He placed Will's grilled salmon down first and twisted the plate into some predetermined alignment, and then presented Elizabeth with the béchamel bolognese; as he did so, the cuff of his shirt sleeve rode up just enough to reveal a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, but he tugged it down and covered the inking over again. His eye caught Elizabeth's for half a second, no more, and he offered her a hesitant smile.

"Enjoy." He gave a half-bow, and then backed away two paces, turned on his heel and strode off towards the kitchens, his stride perhaps a half-step too quick.

She stared after him. A pinch gathered her brow, and her gaze lingered even once he had disappeared into the sheen of stainless steel and the bellows of orders and steam that lurked beyond the swing door. "He doesn't seem the sort to be working in a place like this," she said, more to herself than to Will. But then she shook the thought away as quickly as it had arisen. Maybe Henry was right, maybe she was just looking for distractions.

"He's probably just nervous. You have that effect on people, you know." Will poked at the salmon with his fork. He broke off a chunk and flaked it over the plate.

Elizabeth's own fork hovered over the dish of sauce-drenched pappardelle. "I don't make people nervous. And will you quit prodding the salmon."

"You do. And I'm not."

"Yes, you are." She twisted a ribbon of pasta around her fork and raised it to her lips. "And you're pulling that face."

"This is my normal face."

"Look, just say it." She stuffed the pasta into her mouth.

"Say what?"

"You want to swap." Her voice was muffled by her mouthful.

"It just looks a bit dry…and is that albumin?" He poked at the globs of white that clung to the golden pink sides of the salmon fillet.

"God, Will, you're such a child. Give it here." She grabbed Will's plate, heaped a couple of forkfuls of the pappardelle onto it and then handed him the rest of her meal. She mixed the salmon with the sauce from the pasta, and she let a lull pass between them before she spoke again. "So anyway, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

"I knew it."

"Knew what?"

"We couldn't just have a nice, normal meal together. There had to be an ulterior motive."

"Since when have we ever had a nice, normal meal? And do you have to make it sound so sordid?"

"Well then, let's hear it."

She rested her fork against the edge of her plate, and then dabbed the stains of bolognese sauce from the corner of her lips as she chewed over her mouthful. The salmon was perhaps a touch overdone, but nothing that a little sauce couldn't rectify. She returned the napkin to her lap, paused, swallowed. _No more distractions, just say it_. Her gaze locked on Will's. "I'm thinking about running in the next election."

"And?" He looked at her as though she had just announced she was planning to have oatmeal for breakfast.

"And…" Her eyes widened. "I wanted your opinion."

He shook his head, and then concealed a wry smile with a sip of water. "You mean you want my permission."

"That's not what I said."

"But it's what you meant."

She furrowed her brow. "Why would I want your permission?"

"Well, if I say yes then it will assuage any misplaced sense of guilt you have over wanting to run. And if I say no, it gives you the perfect excuse as to why you had to back out when you get cold feet. So, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to give you permission like this is some school trip in sixth grade. You need to make this decision for yourself. Own it, rather than hiding behind the 'opinions' of others."

Elizabeth stared at him as he shovelled her pasta into his mouth. "I remember when you were in twelfth grade and I drove almost seven hours to Houghton Hall and back, missing what should've been my second date with Henry, just to sign your permission slip so you could go on that trip to New York."

Or at least that's what she would have said, if only she'd had that glass or three of red wine.

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Please take a minute and leave a review. Ta.


	5. Chapter Three: …nice and normal

**Chapter Three**

**…****nice and normal.**

**Elizabeth**

**2:04 PM**

A rucked blanket of slate grey cloud had shrouded the sky by the time Elizabeth and Will stepped out of the restaurant foyer and onto the verge of the sidewalk. A river of pedestrians, all in suits or tailored dresses, coursed by. Matt opened the rear door of the black SUV with a clunk, whilst the other DS agents stretched out their arms and formed the walls of the corridor that would convey Elizabeth through the throng and to the safety of the backseat. The way the agents' gazes scoured each building front, each car that crawled past, each face whether gawping or indifferent, turned everything into a threat, everyone into a suspect. Part of her missed those simpler days when she was more likely to get hit by the proverbial bus than by a sniper's bullet.

A shiver shuddered its way out of her shoulders and tightened the back of her neck. After the fug of the restaurant, the open air carried a sting.

"Here." Will unfolded his jacket from where he had draped it over his arm, and he held it up for her. When she hesitated, he gave it a shimmy. "That hospital's like working in a boiler room from a Kafka novel, and I'm already sweating. Just take it."

"Thanks." She slipped her arms into the sleeves, and then stuffed her hands into the pockets and hugged the woollen blazer around her. The sandalwood from his cologne and the lingering trace of body heat had woven into the wool. Both warmed her. She turned back to face him, and tilted her head towards the car. "Can we at least give you a ride?"

The first drops of rain spattered the concrete slabs. The polka dots bled into streaks, and all around them, umbrellas flourished into a low-lying canopy of pewter and peach and teal.

He looked around at the thickening curtain of rain, and then shrugged. "Sure. Why not?" He placed his hand against the middle of her back and ushered her into the car.

The door thudded shut and muffled the world outside. A moment later, the SUV pulled away into the traffic with a low roar. The raindrops that fogged the windows coalesced into rivulets that meandered from one side of the bulletproof glass to the other, and the rhythmic thunk and screech of windscreen wipers played in the background.

Will ran one hand through his hair, tousling the damp strands, and then rested his arm against the door panel and drummed his fingers against the plastic as he stared out of the window. He paused mid-refrain and shot Elizabeth a look. "Thanks for lunch, by the way."

Elizabeth toyed with the cuff of his jacket. "Not exactly nice and normal."

"No." He gave a mouth shrug that broke into a smile. "But that's not us."

She snorted and shook her head to herself. _True_. But her expression soon sobered. "I really think you should go to London, even just for the weekend."

He slackened the knot of his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. "Look, Sophie said it was up to me if I wanted to go or not."

"You do realise that meant she wanted you to go."

"Of course, but I'd rather not see her parents, so if she's going to give me the choice—passive-aggressively or otherwise—I'm going to choose not to go. Plus, I really do have work." He dabbed at his brow with the cuff of his shirt sleeve. "It's really hot in here. Are you hot?"

"It's like sixty degrees, so no. And what's wrong with her parents?"

"You know what in-laws are like. They don't get people like you and me."

"You say that as if we're even remotely similar."

"Two sides of the same coin." He leant forward and fiddled with the vent of the air-con situated between the two seats in front. "Look, you never got on with Henry's family."

"I did get on with them, they just didn't want to get on with me. They didn't like the choices Henry had made in life and it was easier for them to dislike me than to accept that he was his own person." God forbid he should go to college, or join the Marines, or fall in love with a girl who _came from money_ and whose parents had owned horses. "And whether they liked me or not, I still visited them every birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I always made the effort."

Will reeled, his eyes snapped shut, and he steadied himself against the seat in front.

She frowned at him. "Are you all right?"

He dismissed her with a flap of his hand, and then settled back in his seat. With his eyes still shut, he pinched the bridge of his nose, the same way he had done when they went on car trips as kids—about four minutes before their father had to pull over to the side of the road and wrench open the door just as Will hurled.

"Matt," she called through to the front, "we might need to stop—"

"I'm fine." Will took a deep breath and lowered his hand. "False alarm." Although his eyes remained shut, a flush of colour had returned to his cheeks. "You forced yourself to be somebody you're not just to keep them happy."

"No, to keep Henry happy. If I'd let them make it into a battle of me versus them, Henry would've picked me, and I wasn't about to be the reason why he lost his family."

Will opened his eyes and rolled his head to the side against the leather headrest until his gaze caught hers. His brow pinched, whilst a kind of goading smile lit his eyes, like torchlight through evening mist. "Didn't it bug you that he never stood up for you?"

"No," she said, perhaps a touch too quick.

His smile grew, and he chuckled to himself.

A wave of heat rolled through her veins. Her jaw tensed. She wrenched her seatbelt to slack, wrestled Will's jacket off, and then tossed it at him. It might have masked his face for the few seconds it took for him to pull it down and fold it into his lap, but it did nothing to suppress that chuckle. The list of reasons why she needed to meditate was about to receive entry number fifteen.

She turned her shoulder on him, resisted a huff of annoyance, and stared out of the window into the blur of car lights. The red and amber and white floated in the forest of vehicles like the fireflies she and Henry had seen in the Great Smoky Mountains back when they were first dating and he had taken her camping to 'apologise for Maureen'; though something told her that what he had really meant was to 'apologise for not defending her against Maureen'.

Her words misted the glass. "I got to see him laughing with his brother and sisters, and chatting with his parents. That's all I wanted. Sometimes seeing someone else's happiness is enough."

"Vicarious happiness with your vicarious family?" Will drawled over the words. "That says it all."

"That's life, Will. You've got to take it where you can get it."

When the silence between them stretched and started to fray, she pivoted back to face him. A sheen of sweat clung to his brow and beads trickled down from his temple like the raindrops on the bulletproof glass that surrounded them. A haze had settled in his eyes, his gaze so distant it looked as though he were staring into a world that only he could see.

Unease oozed through her bloodstream like chilled molasses. "Matt, how far are we from the hospital?"

"In this traffic? Fifteen to twenty minutes, ma'am." Matt glanced over his shoulder. "Is everything all right?"

"No," she muttered. She unbuckled her seatbelt, shifted along the seat, and reached out to press the back of her hand to Will's forehead, like she had done so many times with the kids when they were running a high fever in a kind of vain hope that the thermometer was wrong and they weren't about to make a trip to the emergency room.

But when she neared, Will batted her away. "I jus don…" The words slurred off his tongue. "I jus don't…"

She caught hold of his hand as it wafted through the air, and she pressed two fingers to his pulse. It thrummed beneath her touch, one beat running into the next, and her own heartbeat leapt into sync. "Jesus. His heart's racing, and he's burning up. Matt, I need you to—"

"Do you smell burnt toast?" Will said with a puzzled frown, a moment of clarity.

Then his eyes rolled back to white and he flopped to the side with a deep groan. With his seatbelt still on, he slumped across the backseat, his head in Elizabeth's lap.

She shook his shoulder. "Will?"

Nothing.

Again. "Will?"

Nothing.

And again. "Will?"

Nothing.

"Ma'am?" Matt called over his shoulder. "What's going on?"

"I don't know. He's not responding. Why's he not responding?" She eased herself out from underneath Will's weight, twisted around, and squeezed herself down into the footwell. His eyes were all white, no more than a sliver of blue peeking from the top. She patted his cheek, then pinched it, then slapped it. "Will? Will, wake up. Will?"

"Ma'am, I need you to sit back and put your seatbelt on."

"Will?" She shook his shoulder again.

But then his limbs jerked, and she recoiled. The back of her head hit the seat in front.

Will's arms and legs shook, everything rapt in violent convulsions, and for an instant, the car around her faded out of focus, time suspended and all she could see was one of those cartoons that Jason had loved to watch when he was five or six years old, the ones where someone gets shocked with electricity and their whole body leaps into the air and spasms for comedic effect. There was a reason why she had banned those cartoons. But now, with Will's body thrashing right in front of her, everything flailing whilst a stream of hoarse moans mumbled their way out between clenched teeth, she couldn't escape the macabre peals of canned laughter that echoed through her head.

Pink saliva foamed from Will's mouth, and she was thrust back to the car, finding herself crouched in front of him as his breathing shallowed to rasps of breath, his skin ashened until it turned mottled grey, and his body shook and shook and shook.

"Oh God, he's seizing. Matt, he's seizing. What do I do? Tell me what to do."

"Hold on, ma'am."

The siren wailed, red and blue lights flashed, and the car lurched out into the traffic.

Elizabeth dug her fingernails into the seat and clung so tight that she indented half-crescents into the leather, whilst Will continued to convulse. The vibrations seeped into her fingertips and shook them to numb. His eyes jerked from side to side, flashes of white, blue, white. Blood-tinged foam trickled down from the corner of his lips in a bubbling string and pooled on the black leather seat. She pressed her forehead to the edge; the cool leather burned against her skin. Her pulse pounded through her ears and drowned out the world around her. This wasn't happening. They were just meant to get lunch. Brother and sister. Nice and normal.

_But that's not us, right?_

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**Thank you for your reviews! They make me smile.**


	6. Chapter Four: …DEFCON 1

**Writer's Note**: I apologise to anyone whom I offended with my last post. I have extensive personal experience when it comes to seizures, and I have done research as well. My experience will always differ from other people's experiences, and I would never suggest that what I write should be taken as fact, nor would I suggest that the experiences or perceptions that I choose to write should be taken to represent everyone else's experiences and perceptions. What I write is only true to what I know. I understand the frustration of living with a medical condition that is misunderstood, even by people within the medical field, so I am truly sorry for any hurt I have caused.

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**Chapter Four**

**…****DEFCON 1.**

**Jay**

**2:17 PM**

Jay stopped fiddling with his biro and chucked it onto the pages of the binder that rested on the table in front of him. He pushed up the cuff of his shirt sleeve and glanced at his watch for what must have been the fifth time in the last six minutes, and then braced himself against the arms of the chair and rose to standing.

"Excuse me one minute," he murmured to Kat through a pained smile, and then stepped out of the conference room and towards the desk where Blake was tapping away at his computer keyboard, his gaze fixed on the screen. "Blake."

Blake continued to type.

"Blake."

Blake continued to type.

"Blake."

"Just a second." Blake's fingertips fluttered over the keys for a further ten seconds, and then he hit 'enter' with a flourish, and spun his chair around to face Jay. "How can I help you?"

"Do you have any idea if the secretary is planning on joining us this afternoon?"

"She's running a few minutes late—"

Jay clenched his back teeth and let out a huff. "Perfect. Just perfect."

A slight pinch marked Blake's brow, his expression somewhere between incredulity and disdain. "But she did leave late." His lips twisted into a wry smile. "Funny how that works out."

"Please will you just call her." Jay motioned to the telephone on Blake's desk.

Blake arched an eyebrow, a challenge. "She'll be here when she gets here."

Jay stared at Blake—hard—but Blake equalled the look.

Jay let out a single tut and shook his head to himself. He shouldn't say it, he shouldn't say it, he shouldn't— "This is what happens when you schedule a lunch with her brother in the middle of an already hectic day. The two of them start squabbling over God knows what, and before you know it, an hour's lunch break turns into three hours of tabloid talk show. I could've told you this was going to happen, and now everything else has to be pushed back or rearranged."

Blake eyed Jay as he might had Jay just dropped to the floor in imitation of one of Chloe's more spectacular temper tantrums. "Look, I just make the appointments…but if you'd like, I'd be happy to schedule an appointment with her for you so that you can discuss that. I'm sure she'd be most appreciative of your insights."

Jay pursed his lips.

"No?" Blake paused, and then gave him an acid drop smile. "Good. Then that's settled." The smile vanished. "She'll be here in a minute." He swivelled back to face his desk.

"I doubt that." Matt strode along the aisle between the desks of the outer office. He carried a bag in one hand, the red symbols of the Chinese takeaway cartons watered down to pink where they peeked through the translucent white plastic. His hair clung in damp curls to his forehead, and the bag dripped a trail of raindrops along the carpet. "Have you seen the traffic? You'd think people had never seen rain before."

He dumped the bag at the foot of Blake's desk and then wrestled off his overcoat, the wool beaded with moisture, and chucked it onto the coat stand in the corner.

Jay looked to Blake. "Please will you just call her and casually ask for an ETA?"

Matt snorted. "Since when does Blake do casual?" He grabbed the plastic bag from the floor and then strode past Jay and into the conference room. The scent of sesame oil and spices leaked out of the cartons and trailed after him.

Blake shot a glare in Matt's direction, and then turned to Jay. "Look, her detail said she was en route, so why don't you just prepare for the meeting—"

"We are prepared. We were prepared ten minutes ago." Jay gestured to the conference room. "And every minute that passes is another minute closer to the Russians backing out."

"She'll be here."

With his hands on his hips, Jay shook his head to himself, gave another tut, and then retreated to his seat at the head of the table.

Matt leant over the desk and unpacked the cartons from the plastic bag. He popped open the lid of one of the cartons and then slid it across the table towards Kat, followed by a pair of chopsticks that scooted over the edge of the wood.

But Kat scrambled and caught the chopsticks between two fingers just before they hit the floor.

Matt grinned. "Nice catch."

Kat smirked and gave a bow. She unwrapped the chopsticks, snapped them apart, and then stirred them through the contents of the carton. The lemony perfume of Sichuan pepper and the zing of chilli hit the air. Her gaze caught Jay's as she raised a chunk of chicken to her lips, the meat glossy and stained fiery orange. "So what's the deal with MSec and her brother anyway?"

Jay helped himself to a clump of sticky rice, and then passed the carton on to Kat. "What do you mean?" He stirred the rice into his portion of sweet and sour pork.

"I mean," Kat said through her mouthful, "why does she get all…" She gestured with her chopsticks, drawing vague circles in the air. "…antsy about meeting up with him?"

"You think that's antsy?" Blake leant over table, his tie held flat to his stomach, and he sorted through the cartons until he found the chicken chow mien. "This is only DEFCON 4. Apparently she was up at DEFCON 2 first thing this morning."

Jay, Kat and Matt paused mid-mouthful and stared up at him.

"What?" Blake's smile faltered. "Dr McCord and I have a system…"

But they continued to stare at him, their eyes wide.

Blake's smile withered into nothing, replaced once again by a pinch in his brow, and he flapped one hand at them. "You know what, just carry on." He retreated to the chair behind the desk in the corner of the room, and sat in silence as he lifted the golden noodles to his mouth, one hand cupped beneath them, ready to catch any drops of soy sauce.

Jay's gaze lingered on Blake for a moment longer before it returned to Kat. "I don't know much. I mean, obviously they lost their parents when they were young, but apart from that all I can gather is that they have a kind of love-hate relationship, things can get volatile at times, he knows how to push her buttons—"

"Plus, he calls her 'Lizzie'." Matt gave an awkward laugh. "And that's just weird."

When no one joined in his laughter, just stared at him, Matt's lips drew into a tight bud and he found sudden interest in the bottom of his takeaway carton, avoiding Jay's and Kat's gazes.

"Sounds rough," Kat said. She chewed over her mouthful and then grabbed the pitcher of water from the middle of the table and poured herself a glass. "Did they have any other family?"

"She's mentioned an aunt and an uncle before," Jay said, "but I don't think they were close. I think she and her brother spent most of their time at boarding school before heading out on their own."

"And she's older, right?" Kat took a sip from her glass, her gaze locked on Jay.

Jay nodded.

Kat gave a mouth shrug. "Makes sense."

"How's that?" Matt paused with a tangle of noodles dangling over his carton.

"My cousins lost their mother when they were young, and my uncle was nothing if not a drunk, so my eldest cousin had to step into that parental role. I know it's not the same as what happened to MSec, but being forced to grow up like that so suddenly…it changes a person." Kat stopped for a second, as though contemplating, and then she raised her eyebrows into two thin arches. "Plus, it explains the volatility."

Jay watched her. He waited for further explanation.

When Kat caught his gaze, she leant in and rested her elbows against the tabletop, and her eyes widened. "Oh, come on. Imagine if your older sister went from having zero power over you to assuming the role of parent and protector just like that. You're bound to rail against it."

Jay considered that. Then his lips tugged into a wry smile, and he nodded. "Makes sense."

"Though I would advise you not to mention that hypothesis around the secretary," Blake said, "unless you want to take us to DEFCON 1."

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**Thanks for reading!**


	7. Chapter Five: …burnt toast

**Chapter Five**

**…****burnt toast.**

**Elizabeth**

**2:28 PM**

The wheels hit a bump in the road, and the car juddered and jumped. In the background the siren blared, punctuated by the beeps of the horn, whilst on the backseat Will gasped and gurgled over every breath. His limbs were still jerking, his eyes were all white, and pink foam frothed around his mouth.

Elizabeth grabbed another tissue and wiped the bloodied saliva from his grey-blue lips. "Come on, Will, come on. He's still seizing. Why's he still seizing?"

The car careened around a corner, and Elizabeth wedged her back against the seat in front to stop herself from toppling over, but Will shifted on the backseat and rolled so that his face turned upwards, and the pink foam bubbled down into his mouth. Elizabeth pushed herself up, took hold of his shoulder, and tried to manoeuvre him onto his side, but the convulsions fought against her, and each jerk and twitch returned him to his back.

"Ma'am, I'm pretty sure this goes against all protocol," Matt shouted from the front seat. "Maybe we should pull over and wait for the ambulance—"

"If this were me seizing in the backseat of your car, would you really pull over in the middle of DC traffic and just wait?"

Matt remained silent.

"Exactly, so screw protocol and just get us to the hospital." Elizabeth wiped her forehead against the crook of her elbow and swept back the strands of hair that clung to her damp skin. She cradled Will's head in one hand, and cushioned him from the hard plastic casing of seatbelt buckle.

Will gulped for air. Then his chest stilled, and his breathing stopped.

"He's not breathing." Elizabeth brought her ear as close to his chest as the shaking would allow. _Please be breathing, please be breathing_.

Nothing.

Threads of nausea wound their way around the pit of her stomach. "Matt, he's not breathing, he's not breathing."

"Almost there, ma'am. I can see the hospital now."

"Hurry." She stroked the hair back from Will's face. "Please hurry."

The car screeched to a stop, and seconds later, a woman in navy blue scrubs, her long dark hair coiled into a high bun, wrenched open the back door. The smell of wet concrete and gasoline flooded the backseat. The woman turned her chin to her shoulder and shouted, "We need a cart here. Now." Then she extended her hand to Elizabeth. "Ma'am, I need you to get out of the car."

Elizabeth clung to the edge of the seat and pushed herself up from her crouch. But her legs screamed with cramp and trembled beneath her weight, and she tripped and staggered forward. The doctor caught hold of her arm and steadied her as she clambered out of the car into the shards of rain that pelted down. Matt dashed around from the driver's side and took hold of Elizabeth by the elbow; he both propped her up and guided her a step backwards as the doctor climbed up into the footwell.

"How long's he been seizing?" the doctor shouted.

"I don't know," Elizabeth said. Her mind fogged with panic. _Think, Lizzie, think_. "Ten minutes? Maybe more. It feels like more."

Three men in the same navy blue scrubs ran towards the vehicle with a trolley trundling between them, just as the other two SUVs of the motorcade splashed through the puddles of the ambulance bay and skidded to a halt. One of the men joined the woman in the backseat, whilst the other two hovered by the open door.

The woman leant over Will's shaking form, stared past her colleagues, and locked eyes with Elizabeth. "And has he stopped at all, or has this been constant?"

"Constant," Elizabeth said, just as the other DS agents fled their vehicles and encircled her. She shrugged her elbow free from Matt's grasp and took a faltering step towards the car. "He was complaining that he was hot…then he seemed a bit, I don't know, funny?…he said something about burnt toast, and then he passed out, and a few seconds later he started shaking."

The woman turned to her colleagues. Her gaze flitted to all three of them in turn. "Right, let's get him onto the cart on the count of three. Then I want IV access, let's get him on oxygen, we'll need ten milligrams of diazepam as soon as we have a line. Ready? One, two, three."

The four of them shifted Will out of the car and onto the cart. The two men already on the concrete lifted and locked the metal side rails, and then dragged the trolley between them as they ran towards the automatic doors of the emergency department. The wheels trundled and clattered over the concrete and sent up arcs of rainwater that flailed through the air. The other two doctors scrambled out of the car and splashed down onto the waterlogged ground.

"This way, ma'am." The female doctor motioned for Elizabeth to follow her inside as she hurried towards the entrance. She grabbed a notepad and pencil from the pocket of her scrubs, and as they strode through the cold fluorescent glow of the corridor she scribbled down what looked more like symbols than words. "Patient's name?"

"Will—William—Adams."

The doctor cast Elizabeth a look over her shoulder, her dark eyebrows arched, a flash of recognition in her eyes. "The trauma surgeon?"

Elizabeth nodded. "He's my brother."

"Has Dr Adams ever had a seizure before?"

"No."

"Any family history of seizures?"

Elizabeth opened her mouth, but her tongue floundered.

The doctor prompted her with another glance.

"I…I…uh…I don't know."

The doctor's pencil paused on the page. "Has he sustained any head injuries?"

"No, I don't think so." The lights of the trauma centre swam around Elizabeth, and she clutched her brow. Will hadn't said anything. He would have said something, right? "He was fine. We had lunch together and he was fine. Then he started looking unwell…"

The doctor nodded. They came to a stop at the end of the trauma bay where a team of doctors and nurses swarmed around Will. Someone had fitted an oxygen mask, but it kept slipping down or being jostled to the side as he continued to thrash on the cart.

"He's going to be okay, right?" Elizabeth said. "He has to be okay."

"Is he diabetic? On any medications? Any recreational drugs?"

"No. Not that I'm aware of. And no." Elizabeth paced away from the doctor, and then whirled to face her again. She flung a gesture in Will's direction. "Look, he was fine. Half an hour ago, he was fine. Tell me he's going to be all right."

"We're going to do our best, ma'am."

Elizabeth spun away, and the room pitched around her, like an aeroplane cabin caught in turbulence. It knocked aside her breath. She leant forward, and with her eyes closed, she clutched her knees until the rocking stopped. She raked one hand through her hair, the strands wet and bedraggled from the rain, and then she returned to standing.

"I know this is difficult…"

Elizabeth cut the doctor short with a sharp look—Difficult? _Difficult?_

A faint blush rose in the woman's cheeks, but she persisted, "I need to know if your brother has any allergies that you're aware of? Any medications he can't have?"

Elizabeth shook her head.

"Okay, well, if you'd like to wait—"

"I'm staying right here."

"Ma'am." Matt stepped forward, and gripped her elbow. He lowered his voice as he dipped towards her ear. "I can't guarantee your safety—"

"I'm not leaving him." And before either of them could protest any further, she shook herself free from Matt's grasp, strode over to the foot of the trolley and wrapped her fingers around the metal bar at the end. The cold bit into her palms and soothed the heat that burned through her, but the reverberation from Will's convulsions hummed through her veins, and the gallop of his pulse still throbbed in her fingertips, just as it had done when she had pressed them to his wrist and was hit by the realisation—none of this was okay.

"He's had ten IV of diazepam," one of the nurses called out.

"Any response?" the doctor said, and she stepped in line with Elizabeth.

"The activity slowed and seemed to stop, but started again within a minute."

"How long since the last dose?"

"Coming up to ten minutes."

"Push another ten," the doctor said. "Let's bag him, and I want ABGs, full blood count, glucose, electrolyte panel, renal and hepatic function. We have IV access, so let's get fluids in him. Ten per cent dextrose."

The medical staff flurried around Will. They grabbed the equipment from the trays of the surrounding carts, and in their haste, they dropped the plastic wrappings to the floor and then kicked them to the side. The plastic scuffed over the vinyl. One of the doctors in navy blue scrubs removed the oxygen mask from Will's face, and untangled it from the mess of wires and tubes that led to and from Will's body, and then he replaced it with bag-valve mask that he held over Will's nose and mouth, whilst the other hand squeezed the bag and forced oxygen into Will's lungs.

The nurse called out, "Ten diazepam going in now."

Elizabeth waited. And waited. And waited. So this was it, this was how it would happen. She should have felt afraid, right? That's what people felt when they watched a loved one dying. But instead it felt as though she were watching the scene in front of her through a screen; it was just another daytime medical drama, and a rerun at that, or at least a variation on a theme. A hundred ways for Will to die. She should have felt afraid, right? But she'd been preparing herself for this moment for thirty-five years, and now that it was here, all she felt was numb inevitability.

"It's stopping," the nurse called out.

Elizabeth's gaze jolted to the bed. Her grip on the metal bar had tightened so much that her knuckles had formed white peaks through her skin. She let go and pushed through the crush of bodies alongside the trolley, and then perched on the edge of the bed. She gripped Will's hand, now stilled, though still tense, and marked with smears of wet and rusted blood that snuck out from beneath the dressing around the cannula.

"Will? Can you hear me? Will?" She rubbed her thumb back and forth over his knuckles.

One of the doctors who had rushed Will in from the car leant over him and shone a pen torch in his eyes. "Eyes still deviated, positive for pupillary hippus."

Elizabeth twisted around and found the female doctor. "What does that mean?"

But the doctor looked past her. Wisps of her dark hair had escaped her bun and now framed her face. "Prepare a phenobarbital infusion, we need to secure his airway, someone page Dr Martins and Dr Owens, Jenkins as well, and we'd better warn the ICU."

"What's happening?" Elizabeth's pulse throbbed through her ears. She wiped her forehead with the back of her sleeve; her skin was hot and slick with the beads of rain that trickled down from the roots of her hair.

The doctor nodded to one of the nurses in pale pink scrubs, and with the tilt of her head, she beckoned the nurse over. Then she placed a hand on Elizabeth's shoulder. "Ma'am, I need you to move out of the way. If you'd like to go with—"

Elizabeth shrugged her off. "Just tell me what's happening."

"Ma'am." The nurse offered her a firm smile and swept her arm out wide, directing Elizabeth away from the trauma bay. "If you'd just step this way. The doctors need to—"

"He's seizing," someone shouted, just as the trolley started to quake beneath Elizabeth.

Will's hand jerked free from her own, and as the medical staff surged to his side, she stumbled and backed away from the bed. The nurse herded her away several paces, her arms spread wide as though she expected Elizabeth to rush back at any second.

But as Will's body convulsed and writhed, Elizabeth turned away and tottered towards the nurses' station. She tugged at the neck of her blouse, and created pockets of air to fan her damp skin. Will was right: Why did they have to make hospitals so hot? It was like they were trying to scorch the pathogens from the air. You'd think the lashings of disinfectant would be enough—the stench roiled her stomach with every breath.

"Ma'am?"

And Will was right about another thing too: Somewhere, someone was burning toast.

"Ma'am? Are you okay, ma'am? Help! I need help over—"

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**I love reading your comments and thoughts, so keep them coming.**

**Reviews help with the breeze-block wall of self-doubt that slams into me every other minute or so.**


	8. Chapter Six: …the storm

**Chapter Six**

**…****the storm.**

**Stevie**

**2:54 PM**

Stevie lugged the stack of files over to the cabinet in the corner of the office, dumped them on top, and eased open the drawer. The drawer grated as it slid along its railings, and then clunked to a stop with a reverberation that tingled through her fingertips. One by one, she lifted down the files, examined their labels, and returned them to what she hoped was the correct section. She fought back a sigh. And some of her friends still thought working at the White House was glamorous…

The rain pelted the windowpane next to her in a pattering thrum, and the chill seeped through the glass, stained the air and crawled over her skin. The hairs of her arms stood to attention. In the corridor outside, staffers bustled past in a flurry of suits and whispers, the clomp and clack of their shoes and heels half a beat too fast. Her own pulse jumped to keep up.

"Is there something going on that we don't know about?" Stevie asked, and when Adele looked up at her expectantly, she tilted her head towards the doorway, her eyes wide, just as three men in black suits marched by and headed towards the Oval Office.

Adele chuckled, and as she shook her head to herself, her gaze returned to the paperwork laid out on the desk in front of her. "Honey, there's always something going on that we don't know about. That's government."

Stevie nodded, but her gaze lingered on the hallway and the flutter of disquiet lingered in her veins. She picked up another file and slotted it into its place in the cabinet. What had Harrison said? Something about being raised in a house of secret and lies? As though being a CIA brat was reason enough to be hooked on heroin. Maybe people like them had it better than most; at least they knew that their parents were lying to them, keeping secrets for the good of the nation. Or maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Stevie fingered the edge of the file in her hand. She turned back to Adele. "But they would tell us if there was something big going on, right?"

Adele placed a metal ruler beneath the text and dragged a fluorescent pink highlighter over one of the sentences. "They tell us exactly what we need to know when we need to know it." She dropped the highlighter to the desk and arched her eyebrows at Stevie. "Stop worrying so much about what's going on out there and just you worry about what you're meant to be doing in here." She paused, her mouth open, and then she let out a sigh. "I took a pass at that binder you put together for Russell…" She tugged her lips to one side.

Stevie cringed. "That bad?"

"Not your best work." Adele snapped the file shut and rose up from her chair. She handed the file to Stevie. "There's a reason why Russell never hires interns. Don't let him regret taking you on."

"Got it."

Stevie returned the files to the cabinet, double-checking the labels as she went. At least she could get that right. She hoped.

When there were just two files remaining, Russell stormed through the doorway, his cell phone glued to one hand. He stared down at the screen and punched away at the keypad as he strode straight through into his office. A moment's lull passed, then—"Stevie. In here. Now."

Stevie dropped the file in her hand onto her desk and hurried after him. Beneath the heat of Adele's gaze, a blush crawled into her cheeks. Russell stood at the far side of the room, still texting. When he gestured towards the door, Stevie eased it shut and then crept towards his desk in hesitant half-steps. She clutched her hands in front of her and fought to still her fidgeting fingers; if she had still worn an engagement ring, she would have twisted it around and around and around.

"Look, if this is about the binder. I'm sor—"

Russell pointed to the armchair next to her. "Sit."

But she remained standing. "If you're going to fire me, please can you just do it quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. It's worse when you drag it out."

He stuffed his cell phone into his trouser pocket and looked up at her. "Your mother's in hospital."

She reeled. "Wh…what?"

"We just received word from her detail. Apparently she collapsed."

Stevie grasped hold of the armrest of the chair, and she sank down onto the cushion. "Oh, wow. Is she…uh…is she…?"

"Her condition's unknown." Russell grabbed a bottle of water from the mini refrigerator behind his desk and handed it to Stevie.

She took it from him and clutched it until her fingers slipped over the condensation and the plastic crackled. She met his eye with a wince. "And what…what does that mean exactly?"

"It means that we don't know what's wrong with her."

"But she's alive…right?"

Russell ran one hand over his head and then held the back of his neck. He shrugged, and his lips quirked in sync. "We don't know."

"Um…okay…wow."

"Things are going to get pretty busy around here and people are going to start talking, so I thought you should hear it from me first." His cell phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket. He frowned down at the screen for a moment, and then let out a deep breath and looked up at her. "Look, I need to go sort out State. Are you going to be okay waiting here?"

"I…uh…I guess." She pushed herself to her feet as Russell strode towards the door, but her legs shook beneath her and she had to cling to the back of the chair for support. Her nails dug into the cerulean leather. "But, what…what should I do?"

"Secret Service agents are bringing your brother and sister in." Russell paused, one hand on the doorknob, and he turned back to face her. His gaze flitted up and down. His voice softened; it sounded like defeat. "You should be with them."

Then he raised his phone to his ear. "I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything." He hauled open the door—"Talk to me."—and he was gone.

The door swung shut with a clunk. Stevie half lowered herself, half collapsed back into the seat. A hush enveloped the room, broken only by the rain that hammered against the window panes and the _tock…tock…tock…_ of the grandfather clock in the corner.

Once, when she was fourteen, back when they lived on the horse farm, there had been an almighty thunderstorm that had cut out all the power. She, Alison and Jason had huddled up with their parents on their bed, and surrounded by the blankets and pillows and each other's warmth, they had lain there and listened to the rain that pounded the roof above, whilst the only light came from the flashes of lightning through the curtains. Each rumble of thunder had stirred a kind of primal fear in the pit of Stevie's stomach, one that she was far too grown-up to admit to feeling. But without her having to say a word, her mother had reached across and stroked her hair, each stroke like the hands of a clock that counted down the seconds until the storm passed. At some point she must have fallen asleep, lulled by that touch, and when she awoke, the rain had stopped, the light on the landing glowed again and everything was so, so quiet. But rather than slipping free from her parents' bed and slinking back to her own room, she stayed, safe in the warmth of her mother's scent and arms.

The door sighed open behind her, and Adele's voice reached out to her across the room. "I heard what Russell said. I'm so sorry, honey."

Stevie stared down at the bottle of water clutched between her hands, whilst the rain hammered and the clock _tocked_ and a bitter chill stole any last remnants of warmth from her skin. "Why couldn't he have just fired me instead?"

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**Thank you for all of your reviews on the previous chapter!**

**I know some of these early chapters are short, but if you stick around for the whole story, I will make up for it. I promise.**


	9. Chapter Seven: …the tub toss

**Chapter Seven**

**…****the tub toss.**

**Jay**

**3:14 PM**

Jay and Kat picked up the empty takeaway cartons and paper chopstick wrappers from between the open binders and dull pink manila files that were spread across the desk in the conference room, and they chucked them into the bin that Matt held up for them, as though they were playing a game of tub toss at a carnival. Though the odds of winning that game looked far more promising than getting their afternoon, or the talks with Russia, back on track.

Blake clunked the phone down into the cradle. "It's still going to voicemail." He stood up from his seat behind the desk in the corner and dropped his own carton into the bin. "Her detail said she was leaving…maybe she got called into the White House on her way here."

Daisy glanced up from her tablet. "There were a lot of sirens when I was out to lunch." She gave a half-shrug. "It's not impossible that something's going on."

Jay shook his head. "If it were the White House, someone would have told us." He looked to Blake, his brow furrowed. "Did they say that she had left or that she was leaving?"

"I don't know. Does it matter?"

"Well, left implies that she had already said her goodbyes and was safely in the car, whereas leaving could mean that she's still in the foyer of the restaurant bickering with her brother." He motioned to the phone. "Try her again."

"Because you know what they say—" Matt dumped the bin on the floor near the sliding doors. "—fifth time's the charm."

Jay shot Matt a dark look, considered a retort, couldn't find one, and then gestured once more to the phone instead. "Just call her, will you."

"I would," Blake began, and then he arched his eyebrows and nodded towards the outer office, "but I have a feeling you might want to deal with that first."

"Deal with what?" Jay spun around, his hands on his hips, and in less than a second, his stomach sank. _Russell Jackson_. He clicked his tongue. "Great… Just great…"

Russell stormed past the conference room—"Her office. Now."—and straight through into the secretary's office; all the while, his gaze was buried in the screen of his cell phone.

A lull descended on the conference room. The staff stared at the space where Russell had just been, as though they were gawping at the trail of debris and destruction left in the wake of a tornado.

"Did he mean us?" Kat asked.

"Only one way to find out," Matt said.

But no one made a move.

The side door to the office swung open, and Russell leant out. He met them with a glacial stare. "What part of 'now' are you struggling to comprehend?"

The staff shared a look, the silent equivalent to drawing straws as to who would have to follow Russell inside first, until Blake let out a huff—"Fine." He pushed past the others and strode into the office.

"Mr Jackson, sir, the secretary isn't back from lunch yet," Blake said as Jay, Matt, Daisy and Kat filed in after him.

"I'm aware." Russell read from the screen of his cell phone, a frown heavy on his brow.

Blake's lips tensed. "So, you know where she is?"

"I do." Russell made a vague gesture towards the side door. "Shut that, will you."

Jay folded his arms across his chest. "Look, we've got a lot going on today, so if the secretary's been called into the White House, I'd appreciate—"

"She's not at the White House." Russell's cell phone pinged, and his frown deepened. He muttered to himself, "What on earth compels people to switch off their cell phones?"

Matt copied Jay's stance, his arms folded across his chest. "But if the secretary's not at the White House—"

"You. Door." Russell pointed from Matt to the open side door, and when Matt didn't move, he looked up at him over the rim of his glasses, his eyebrows raised. "If you're waiting for a please, it's not going to happen. Don't make me ask again."

Matt held his ground for all of two seconds, and then turned and stomped towards the door. He swung it shut so hard that it shuddered against its frame.

"If I were you, I'd lose the attitude," Russell said, and then he returned to tapping at the keypad of his phone. "I'm looking for Dr McCord. Does anyone know where I can find him?"

When no one else replied, Blake ventured, "The War College?"

"No," Russell said. "They've already tried there."

Blake opened his mouth.

But Russell cut in, "They say he's not at the house either."

"Who's _they_?" Matt pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"Well, I spoke to Dr McCord first thing," Blake said, "and he said that he would be at the college all morning, but that he might check in this afternoon, after the secretary got back from lunch with her brother."

Russell's gaze fixed on Blake. His eyes widened. "Check in? As in here?" He pointed to the floor.

Blake pursed his lips, as though he was now doubting that the conversation had ever happened at all. "Well, he didn't exactly specify, but I assumed…"

Russell lowered his gaze again and punched a number into his phone. "I need you to clear the secretary's schedule. Quietly. If anyone asks why, you'll say 'no comment', and if anyone starts digging around, you'll refer them straight to me. Do you understand?"

"I'm sorry—" Jay made a time-out sign. "But the secretary is meant to have back-to-back meetings all afternoon. We can't just _clear her schedule_."

Russell lifted the phone to his ear. "You can and you will."

"The situation with Russia is delicate enough as it is. I'm not going to cancel meetings she's had on the books for weeks without a valid reason."

"A valid reason is: because I told you to," Russell said, and then he turned his back on the staff.

"Look, rather than barging in here and making demands, why don't you just tell us where the secretary is, who this '_they_' are that you keep referring to, and what they want with Dr McCord?"

Russell lowered his phone, turned to Jay, and hung up the call. He met Jay's gaze with a stare so deep that it sowed a seed of discomfort right at the pit of Jay's soul. "_They _are the Secret Service agents who have been dispatched to inform Dr McCord that his wife is currently in hospital, condition unknown, after collapsing approximately—" He paused to glance at his watch. "—half an hour ago. So, I'm sorry if her absence has somehow inconvenienced you, but right now—as far as we know—she's fighting for her life. And you'll have to forgive me for thinking that perhaps her husband might want to be there with her."

A hush enveloped the room, as thick as a bore of fog rolling in off the sea. It carried with it a gloom, a subtle shift in light, and as it permeated the air, the patter of rain against the window panes dulled and the trills of telephones in the outer office died out, until even the laboured tock of the mantlepiece clock stopped, and all that remained was the hint of jasmine perfume that clung to the trench coat the secretary had left strewn across the arm of the couch. _Oh, and, Jay, from now on, you're my guy_.

Jay rubbed at his mouth. "I didn't think…" He dared himself to meet Russell's gaze. "I just… I assumed she was running late."

Russell tugged his lips into a grim line. "Well, now you know."

Jay nodded. "I'll…uh…" He cleared his throat. "I'll clear her schedule."

"Quietly, please. The secretary is alive and well until we hear otherwise."

Jay took a step towards the main door. But then he stopped and glanced back, his chin drawn to his shoulder. "But is she…? Alive and well?"

Russell studied him a moment, and then murmured, "I sure as hell hope so."

Jay stepped out and into the waiting area. All around him the sounds of the office hummed—from the chatter of voices to the clack of fingertips striking computer keys to the distant ping of the elevator doors. They came to him as though through an old transistor radio, somewhat detached and faded by time. Only a few minutes had elapsed since he had entered that office, yet somehow as he left, it felt like he was stepping up to the cusp of a new epoch, not yet sure which way the wind would blow him.

"Hey, Jay."

Jay's head jerked around.

Henry was hovering next to Blake's desk. A warm smile lit his face.

"Dr McCord…"

Henry nodded towards the office. "Is she in?"

Jay's mouth hung open. "Henry…"

And with that alone Henry's smile withered. "Where is she?"

Delivering bad news was like playing the tub toss: you could have as many goes as you liked, but you were never going to win. "I think you'd better sit down."

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**As always, thank you for your reviews. They are very much appreciated.**


	10. Chapter Eight: …gone nuclear

**Note:** So, it looks like the site didn't show that I updated the story yesterday. I'm not sure why. I hope everyone who isn't signed up for alerts still noticed the new chapter.

Seeing as this chapter is so short, I might post the next one later today—if I can stop tweaking it and pulling it apart, that is.

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**Chapter Eight**

**…****gone nuclear.**

**Stevie**

**4:01 PM**

Rivulets of rain raced down the window panes in Russell Jackson's office, accompanied by the regular gush and splurge as the gutters overflowed and spewed their contents in a stream against the glass. Every thirty seconds or so, Stevie took a sip from the bottle of water, the declining volume a measure of time passing: how long since she had found out, how long until she would know more. Maybe if she gulped the bottle down, the news would come quicker and then—one way or the other—she would know. But the problem wasn't knowing: it was how to deal with what she knew.

When Jason was little, he used to think that their mother had superpowers—and not just spy-craft, but real, physics-defying superpowers. At the time, Stevie had teased her baby brother, had thought him so innocent and gullible, but now—in her own way—she was guilty of holding such beliefs too, only she didn't have the excuse of being six years old.

When her mother had first taken the job as secretary of state, intrusive thoughts had plagued her. At night, she would lie awake and stare at the ceiling in her dorm and play out all the ways someone might harm her mother. During the day, she would sit in lectures and imagine where she would be when the Secret Service agents arrived and how they would tell her that her mother had been injured, that her mother had died. She had rehearsed her emotions a thousand times, had lived through them more than once too—the coup in Iran, that first panic attack. But then something happened—her mother survived—and the thoughts subsided, because again and again her mother survived. And over time, even when doubt niggled at her, she knew more than anything, that her mother would survive. So yes, her mother did have superpowers, because despite everything, she pulled through, she grew stronger, she survived.

Only in all those thoughts, she never imagined that she would find out like this, being pulled aside one day whilst working as an intern for the White House Chief of Staff. A lot had changed since then, she had changed too, yet surely there was one thing that would always remain the same.

"She has to survive."

The words fell from her lips with such certainty, but her sips from the plastic bottle slowed to once a minute—to preserve the volume of water, to protect the sanctity of that limbo.

At the creak of the door behind her, Stevie rose up from the armchair. One hand clung to the back of the cushion, her fingernails buried in the supple leather, whilst the other clutched the water bottle until the plastic crackled.

"This had better be good." Alison dumped her cerise canvas tote down onto the table in the middle of the room. "I was in the middle of Construction when those guys stormed in and practically dragged me away." She rolled her eyes, and dug through the bag. "It was so embarrassing."

"We've probably just gone nuclear again." Jason chucked his backpack down at the foot of one of the armchairs in the corner, next to the grandfather clock. He knelt down beside it and rooted through the clutter of workbooks and crumpled sheets of paper.

"If we'd gone nuclear, we'd be dead by now." Alison fished out her headphones and a sketchpad, and then pulled up a seat at the table. She hung the headphones around her neck and scrolled down the screen of her iPod.

Jason shot her a look over his shoulder. "Uh, not with the de-alerting."

Alison swivelled around in her seat and arched her eyebrows at him. "So, you really think that Russia are loading up their ICBMs and rather than taking us to some kind of nuclear bunker, they thought it best to leave us in Russell Jackson's office?"

Jason shrugged. "Well, maybe they're not using ICBMs, maybe they're using submarines to annihilate the west coast." He unearthed a half-eaten sandwich from the bottom of his bag, and then sank down into one of the cerulean armchairs and propped his feet up on the coffee table.

Alison snorted. "What? You think they mixed up Washington state and Washington DC?"

"Guys?" Stevie said.

But neither Alison nor Jason so much as blinked at her.

"The whole world doesn't revolve around DC." Jason spoke through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Guys?" Stevie tried again, a little louder this time.

Alison gave another eye roll, emphasised by the heavy frame of her eyeliner. "Uh, it kinda does." She turned her back on Jason and continued to scroll down the screen of her iPod.

Jason bunched the clingfilm from his sandwich into a tight ball and lobbed it at Alison. It hit her in the back of the head, causing her to flinch, and he let out a burst of laughter.

Alison jumped up from her chair and stormed towards Jason. "You're so dead."

Jason grabbed his backpack and shielded himself with it as Alison pummelled him. But each blow missed, and Jason's grin only widened. "Well, someone's definitely gone nuclear."

"Right, that's it."

"Guys," Stevie shouted.

Jason looked up, Alison spun around, and in unison, they shouted back, "What?"

"Mom collapsed," Stevie said. "She's in hospital, and Russell said they don't know what happened to her or if she's even alive."

Alison's fists fell to her sides, Jason's backpack to the floor, and the silence that rushed in felt like a nuclear winter.


	11. Chapter Nine: the elegance of mathema

**Chapter Nine**

**…****the elegance of mathematical proofs.**

**Henry**

**4:03 PM**

_"__Henry…there's been an incident. The secretary—" / "Is she alive?" / "We…we don't know."_

Henry jabbed the button of the intercom on the wall outside the high-dependency unit. It let out a wailing bleep. A second passed, then two, then three, then came a buzz and a thunk as the electromagnetic locking system switched off and the door was released. He hauled open the door and stepped onto the corridor of the ward. The clunk echoed behind him as the magnet reengaged.

After the bright lights and bustle that pulsed through the rest of the hospital, he might as well have stepped into another world. Here the walls were a muted pink, and the fluorescent strips simmered with their icy glow; nurses spoke in whispers, whilst visitors held their silent vigils; heart rate monitors blipped, and ventilators whooshed and clicked; disinfectant saturated the air and burned through every breath, but the faint undercurrent of urine lingered like the ache in a bone broken long ago; some patients were wrapped in bandages, all were tangled in lines and wires and tubes; some patients groaned and wept—tears, blood and pain—whilst most succumbed to a grave hush, intubated and unconscious and (hopefully) unaware; and then there were the empty beds: What became of those patients? Did they die or did they go home?

"So, why math?" Henry had asked Elizabeth on their first date.

"Because math is elegant," she replied.

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Elegant?"

"Because math makes the complex simple, it identifies the pattern in the chaos. Because math is a form of discovery that points to a fundamental truth. Because math provides not only an answer, but beauty in understanding." Then she cracked a smile. "And it doesn't hurt that it comes with far fewer essays too."

Over the course of their next few dates she had given him small glimpses, subtle clues, as to why such elegance appealed to her, how math in all its beauty could be a form of escape. Only now did it make sense. Sometimes life threw you situations where nothing was simple, where there was no pattern to discern in the chaos, and where the only fundamental truth to be grappled with was this: Everyone, without exception, will die. When faced with such ugliness, who wouldn't take solace in the elegance of mathematical proofs?

"Sir? Can I help you?"

Somehow he had made it as far as the nurses' station, and a young woman in scrubs the colour of watered-down raspberry lemonade was staring up at him. He massaged his brow and cast his gaze over the array of beds; he flitted over the empty ones and pushed aside thoughts of the patients they had once belonged to. "I'm looking for my wife."

The nurse leant along the desk, reached past a stack of red ring binders, and picked up a clipboard. With her finger poised at the top of the list, she asked, "What was her name?"

"Elizabeth McCord."

The nurse's gaze darted up to meet his. The whites of her eyes had lit with a flash of alarm before she could smother it. Then her gaze flinched away again. She withdrew her finger from the list and lowered the clipboard. "Just a moment." She wheeled her office chair to the opposite end of the desk, and whispered to her colleague, "Page Dr Owens."

The colleague glanced up at Henry, and then nodded and picked up the handset of the white push-button telephone.

Something tugged at the pit of Henry's stomach. He looked between the two of them. They knew._ They knew_. He swallowed, his mouth dry. "I was told she collapsed."

The nurse drew her lips into a thin line. "Dr Owens will explain everything when he gets here. If you'd like to wait in the family room—" She pointed to a door at the end of the alcove behind the nurses' station. "—he won't be long."

But Henry didn't want to wait in the family room.

He took a step closer to the station. His gaze fell to the clipboard and then scoured the files and notes. "If you know something, anything at all…"

The nurse covered the file in front of her, like a schoolgirl hiding her paper during a test. "I think it's best if you wait and speak to the doctor." She strained her lips a touch wider, the line now grim. "He'll be able to answer any questions that you have."

Henry drew in a shaky breath, turned his back on the nurses' station, and ran one hand through his hair. It was stupid: if they knew something, they should just tell him. She was his wife. His _wife_.

He pivoted back to face them. "Look, is it her heart? I know she's been stressed recently, she's been pushing herself too much…but she keeps fit."

"Dr Owens will be just a minute." The nurse held his gaze for a moment, and then returned to the file and held the cover up so that the notes remained hidden. A slight blush crept up her neck, and she tucked a lock of copper blonde hair behind one ear.

Henry flattened his palms atop the counter of the nurses' station. "I understand that you're busy and you have to follow certain protocols, but I just need you to tell me that my wife's okay."

The nurse and her colleague shared another look, and then the nurse eased herself up from her chair and retreated to one of the patient bays. She busied herself with the IV infusion pump, and as she punched the numbers into the keypad, it felt as though each digit were a petal plucked from an oxeye daisy—_She lives. She lives not. She lives. She lives not._ He was meant to be a man of faith, not fate. But within those bleak walls, it was the nurses and doctors who determined how many petals graced the corolla of each flower, not God.

"Just tell me," Henry shouted, and in that artificial silence his voice sounded like blasphemy. "Is my wife okay?"

"Mr McCord." The colleague, the one who had paged Dr Owens, stood up from behind the desk. She rested her hands against the wooden worktop and leant into them, her voice a harsh whisper. "Dr Owens is on his way. Now, if you'd like to wait in the family room, he'll update you on your wife's condition in a minute."

"I don't want to wait in the family room, and I don't want to wait a minute. I just want an answer, yes or no."

"Mr McCord, Dr Owens will—"

"Is my wife alive?"

"It's not my place to—"

"Yes or no."

"I can't just—"

"Is she alive?"

"Mr McCord—"

His voice surged. "Is she alive?"

The colleague let out a tired sigh, and then shook her head to herself. She picked up the one of the files from the desk, not the one the nurse had been reading, but the one at the top of the adjacent pile. She opened it and smoothed down the charts and slips of paper inside; rusted red smears blemished one of the stapled-on sheets—_blood? Elizabeth's blood?_—and splotches of ink marred the graphs. She dragged one finger down the first page, front then back, and then repeated the motion with the second page too, before she tapped her fingernail against the bottom, a string of numbers and letters, a code, an algebraic equation, double-underlined.

Then she looked up at Henry—and perhaps once those eyes had been kind, but after years of building up walls, seeing them demolished and building them up again, they held all the warmth of weathered stone. She opened her mouth, her tongue poised—

And this was it, the moment of truth. In one more second he would know.

"Mr McCord, your wife suffered—"

"No." Henry held up his hand.

She frowned at him; deep grooves furrowed her forehead. Her tongue flopped and floundered. "Mr McCord…?"

"No." He shook his head, his hand still raised. "You're right, I should wait."

"Are you sure? Because—"

"Yes. I'll wait." And before she could say anything else, he strode past the nurses' station and away, his pace ever-quickening—exponential—and he shoved open the door with a thunk and a swoosh, and retreated into the family room at the end of the alcove.

Because what harm was there in waiting one minute when in one minute he might be wishing for just one minute more?

* * *

The pallid pink decor continued into the family room, only now every smudge and stain and scar in the paint boasted its presence in the aching light. Henry blinked and then pinched his eyes and then blinked again. In the absence of the mechanical bleeps and whirs, the air whined.

The first time the other kids had thrown rocks at him, the son of a union leader, he had run. And he had kept on running, ducking his head and dodging those projectiles, all the way home. In his mind, it was the only rational thing to do. His father disagreed. "Don't be a coward, son. If you run from them, you might as well be telling the world that you're ashamed of your old man." And so the next time, begrudgingly, he had commanded his feet to walk whilst he clasped a battered old textbook to the back of his head like a shield. It didn't stop the cuts and scrapes to the rest of his body though. "Wounds will heal, son, and until then you wear them with pride. You let them other boys know that you're no coward, you're not afraid."

The rocks thrown now were different though, not clumps of minerals or mineraloids, but aggregates of words. Or more simply: news. And if the news were bad, it wouldn't leave him with just a cut or scrape, but a mortal wound. So maybe sometimes running wasn't cowardly, maybe ducking and dodging and postponing the moment until the rock struck was the only rational thing to do.

Henry sank down onto one of the taupe-cushioned chairs and stared distantly at the magazines and newspapers that spread like a peacock's train across the coffee table, all well-thumbed and weeks—if not months—old. Most of them hazed through his vision, but one of the broadsheets peeked out from beneath the garish gloss of celebrity magazines and caught his eye. He uncovered it and set it to rest on top of the others. The front page directed the reader to an article inside, an interview with Elizabeth that must have been published three, maybe four, weeks ago. He wet the pad of his thumb and leafed through the faded sheets until he found it. He paused for a moment, and then traced his fingers over the text and released the powdery smell of the ink: her words alive, preserved in the folds of collective memory, eternal in that curation of life.

But what of the words they shared? What was the last thing he had said to her? He didn't have a written record. His mind fogged, as though years, not hours, had passed since that morning.

He had awoken at half past three and reached out through the darkness to touch her, in need of an anchor, only to find the mattress beside him cold once more. He had lain down on the couch in the den and covered himself with the grey woollen blanket, the one that her scent—jasmine, orange blossom, a hint of sandalwood—clung to, and he had waited for her to come back to him, to come back home. And when she didn't, when she returned home but part of her remained missing, he had pushed her too far and they had fought, and though her words had stung, he had seen the threads of guilt and grief beneath, and he had prayed to God to help him understand. And then they had made up and made love, and in that moment of transcendence he had pressed his forehead to hers and sought out her soul, but she had shut her eyes and instead given him a glimpse of something equally unfathomable. She had showered alone, and then when she had emerged, bound in a pearl white towel with water beaded and glistening on her bare shoulders, he had told her, "You don't need to worry about Will." And she had nodded and said, "I know."

"Will," Henry muttered. Someone needed to tell Will. He reached into his jacket pocket, and with a slight shake in his fingers, he fumbled for his cell phone. He switched it on, but before the screen could load, the door to the family room swooshed open and broke the vacuum around him.

"Dr McCord." A man in navy blue scrubs with close-cropped dark hair, a shadow of stubble and a grim smile extended his hand to Henry. "I'm Dr Owens."

Henry faltered to his feet, as unsteady as all those times when he had forced himself to walk not run, and he shook the doctor's hand. The doctor's grip was firm; Henry's not so much.

Dr Owens motioned to the seat. "Why don't you sit down."

Henry paused. He didn't want news that required sitting down. But he wasn't sure his legs wouldn't buckle if he remained standing, so he lowered himself onto the cushion.

Dr Owens pulled up one of the grey plastic chairs. The feet screeched across the floor. He leant forward, his hands clutched in front of him, and as he met Henry's gaze something in his eyes switched, as though his soul had taken a leap back. "Dr McCord, your wife suffered a series of seizures."

"Seizures?" Henry's mind reeled as the first rock struck. He stared at Dr Owens, wide-eyed, his lips parted. "But…but she can't. She doesn't have epilepsy."

Dr Owens shook his head; the response seemed routine. "Not all seizures are associated with epilepsy."

Henry tugged at his mouth. His gaze drifted as though somewhere amidst the haze of the room he might find some kind of understanding. He returned to Dr Owens. "How…how bad?"

"A single seizure in itself can be life-threatening, but in most cases it resolves on its own with no further consequence; however, when seizures are sustained or repetitive, such as in your wife's case, they can become resistant to interventions, and as they continue, they place a huge amount of stress on the body and the brain, to the point that neither is able to compensate."

The words swam though his mind like the formulae he had drilled Elizabeth on before her finals, but even he knew what they added up to: a second blow. "And by that, by being unable to compensate, you mean…?" His throat closed around the word.

Dr Owens gave a small nod.

Henry scrubbed his face with his hands. This couldn't be happening. It couldn't be real. This was the point when he was meant to wake up. This was the point when Elizabeth was meant to hush him and stroke his hair and lull him back to sleep.

But Dr Owens's gaze continued to bore into him, as relentless as the midnight sun. "The medications that we would normally use to terminate seizure activity proved ineffective in your wife's case, and after the third seizure, your wife failed to regain consciousness."

"So…she's…?" Henry's stomach soured, and he waited for the third rock to hit.

"In a coma."

It wasn't the blow he had expected, yet it dazed him nonetheless. A coma meant no more curling up together on the couch with two forks and a tub of salted caramel ice cream. A coma meant no more stolen kisses in White House alcoves and empty offices when—just for a second—she let 'secretary of state mode' slip away. A coma meant no more hearing her laugh, the one with that little snort at the beginning that made her cheeks pinken and that no amount of spy-craft could disguise. But most of all, a coma meant:

"But she's still alive?"

Dr Owens nodded.

Henry swallowed back the thickness in his throat. It was a perverse world where learning that Elizabeth was in a coma felt like a ray of hope. His lips tensed and trembled, and he stared at Dr Owens hard enough to impress the message on his mind. "You need to keep her alive."

Dr Owens's gaze lingered on Henry, and for a moment, no more than a heartbeat, his soul flooded back to his grey eyes. He nodded again. "We've intubated her and we're monitoring her closely, and we'll provide her with all the support we can in order to enable her body to cope, but it's critical that we put a stop to the seizures as quickly as possible."

"But how…? If the medication isn't working…?"

"We need to tackle the root cause of the seizures. Now, in a case like this, with this pattern of symptoms and test results, we would normally suspect an overdose of a particular antibiotic known as diasiozin. In which case—"

Henry frowned and shook his head. "My wife isn't on any antibiotics."

"It's possible that she ingested them unknowingly."

Henry's frown deepened. "You mean an accident?"

Dr Owens's mouth hung open for a long second, and when he spoke, he spoke slowly, like a mountaineer placing each foot with exquisite care so as to avoid a misstep. "It's not my place to speculate, but given your wife's job…"

Henry studied Dr Owens's expression. What was he missing? What was hidden between the lines? Then it hit him, the fourth blow. "You think she was _poisoned_."

"Yes."

He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. _Wake up. Wake up. Wake up_. But just as the battered old textbook hadn't stopped the rocks from coming, refusing to believe something wouldn't make the truth fade away. He clenched his jaw and met the doctor's gaze again. "There must be some way you can reverse it. An antidote or something."

"There is an experimental treatment, a kind of antidote, that has proved effective in some cases. When used promptly, patients have stopped seizing and regained consciousness, and in a patient who's been seizing as long as your wife has, we would hope for a full recovery."

But a touch of hesitance imbued Dr Owens's voice, like the patter of a realtor highlighting the east-facing bay window and the views over the nearby orchard, all the while rubbing out the chalk outline on the floor with the toes of one shoe.

_Experimental…some cases…hope for…_

Henry braced himself. "What are the risks?"

"The antidote itself can prove toxic when given at high levels, though not at the dosage we would anticipate to be necessary in your wife's case."

"Then why haven't you started? If time's crucial…"

"As I said, this antidote is experimental, and while it has proved effective in some cases, in other cases, where a drug other than diasiozin has also been present, the antidote and the other substance have interacted, resulting in rapidly worsening symptoms and—eventually—death."

Henry flinched back in his seat. The fifth blow. "So, if you give her this treatment and she was poisoned with something else, she could die?"

"Yes, and unfortunately we don't know whether whoever poisoned your wife used diasiozin alone or if they used a cocktail."

Henry shook his head. "But there must be some kind of test you can do to find out."

"Detailed analysis would take quite some time, especially when we don't know what other compounds we're looking for, and even with all the time in the world, there's no guarantee that it'll pick up everything."

Henry stood up and paced towards the far end of the room, one hand clutching the back of his neck. The situation was impossible. Impossible. He let out a shaky breath and then turned back to face Dr Owens. "What other options do you have?"

Dr Owens twisted around in his seat and looked up at Henry. "Our only other option would be to deepen your wife's coma using heavy anaesthesia. Normally that would enable us to suppress the brain's electrical activity and stop the seizures, but it's a high risk option and due to the mechanism of action of diasiozin, I can't guarantee that it'll work or that we'll be able to bring your wife out of the coma again. If it doesn't work, it could simply delay her receiving the effective treatment and she could deteriorate in the meantime. And even if the anaesthesia is successful in stopping the seizures, if the underlying cause remains unresolved, the seizures will resume when we withdraw the anaesthetic."

All the permutations lined up in Henry's mind like a Kafkaesque matrix. Agree to the experimental treatment, and the seizures could stop and she could wake up and she could be fine. Or she could die. Deepen her coma, and the seizures could stop and it could buy them some time and it could enable them to rule out the presence of other drugs. Or she could die. Don't agree to the experimental treatment or deepening the coma, and the seizures would continue and her body would be unable to compensate and she _would_ die.

He stared down at the coffee table, with its array of newspapers and magazines. The interview with Elizabeth stared back at him from on top. She was the one who dealt with impossible situations. She was the one who made the life or death decisions. She was the one who came up with wild ideas and somehow made them work. He just supported her. The man beside the woman. Her confidant, her compass. Not her advocate. He looked to Dr Owens. "How confident are you that this antidote will work?"

Dr Owens shook his head to himself. "All the symptoms and results point to diasiozin poisoning, but I can't rule out the possibility of other drugs being present."

"But how confident?"

Dr Owens stilled and met Henry's eye. "Given the test results so far?" His shoulders tensed. "Sixty-six per cent."

Henry reeled. That rock had come out of nowhere. "_Sixty-six per cent_?"

"I know it's a risk, but I wouldn't suggest this option if I didn't believe it to be your wife's best chance for survival."

"You're telling me you think there's a one in three chance this treatment won't work, or might even kill her…? And that's seriously her best option?"

The corner of Dr Owens's lips flinched. He lowered his gaze, and shook his head again. "It's a complex case and we don't have a lot of information, or time."

Henry fumbled his cell phone out from his jacket pocket and scrolled through the contacts. There had to be something they could do, some test, some other option, something that wouldn't see a decision that he made result in her death. "I need to speak to her brother. He's a doctor—"

"You mean Dr Adams?"

"Yes." Henry lifted the phone to his ear, but at the look on Dr Owens's face, he frowned and his gaze darted to the door and through the window into the corridor beyond. "Is he already here?"

"I'm sorry." Dr Owens paled. "I thought you knew."

"Knew what?" The dial tone rang out and out and out. And with each refrain, something at the pit of Henry's stomach tightened, and it sounded like the cracking of tree trunks and the knocking of boulders that herald the oncoming rockslide.

"Dr Adams was brought into our emergency department by your wife shortly before she herself collapsed. It appears that whoever poisoned your wife poisoned your brother-in-law too."

Henry gripped the back of the nearest chair until his knuckles turned white. His mind was a symphony of expletives, and not just in English, but all the multilingual variants Elizabeth had taught him too. But none of them were sufficient, none of them could capture quite what he felt in that moment.

"Is he okay?" His voice came out strained and strangled.

Dr Owens pursed his lips. "There was a significant delay in him receiving treatment, and his symptoms and test results would suggest that he was exposed to a much higher dose."

Henry raised his voice, a touch a gravel to his tone. "But is he okay?"

"The last I heard, my colleagues were still working on him. I can give you an update as soon as I hear more…but I should warn you that his condition was far more severe."

More severe? _More severe? _How could things get worse than the impossible?

"This antidote?" Henry said. "It could work on him too?"

"Yes, if our diagnosis is correct."

Then there was only one solution: "You need to give it to them both."

"Technically you're not Dr Adams's next of kin—"

The symphony of expletives threatened to break loose. "No, but his partner's in London and his only other family's in a coma, and all the while you keep telling me that time is of the essence, so right now it's my call." He sank down into the chair in front of Dr Owens, leant forward in the seat and stared the doctor square in the eye. "Look, I've known Will for thirty years, ever since I first started dating his sister, and I understood even then that the two of them came as a pair. I've been with them for every celebration, every loss, every fight. I can't even begin to tell you how many hours I've spent listening to my wife dissecting their conversations, or stressing over him while she tries her hardest to deal with drama after drama. So, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is what she would want. You do whatever you have to do, but you do not let that man die. Do you understand me? We might not share blood, but he's my brother."

"I hear you." Dr Owens met Henry's stare with eyes more white than anything else. It was hard to tell precisely what the doctor was thinking or feeling; it all swirled beneath the surface, just out of his grasp. "But you should know that our pharmacy only keeps a limited stock of the antidote, so we'll have to split whatever we have available, and the longer it takes to get your wife up to a therapeutic dose, the higher her risk of complications from the seizures."

Henry drew back. He shook his head and bit down on his bottom lip, as much to stop a curse from escaping as to settle the tremor. "You must be able to get more."

"We'll ask surrounding hospitals to send us their supplies, but it might take a while. And as I said, the longer we delay your wife's treatment—"

"What do you need?" Henry snatched up his phone. "A police escort, a helicopter, the president to shut down every street in DC? Whatever it is, I'll make it happen, but you need to keep them alive. You hear me? You need to fix them." His voice cracked. "Just fix them."

Dr Owens nodded, and eased up from his seat. "I'll have them arrange for couriers to blue-light it here." He took a step towards the door. But then he stopped. With his fingers rested against the chrome handle, he turned to Henry. "But Dr McCord…I should warn you that if we're wrong, if there is a reaction between the antidote and the poison and we're treating both your wife and her brother simultaneously…" His gaze drifted, and he scanned the room as though he hoped that somewhere in there he might find the right words. "If we were to give one of them a dose of the treatment first and they were to deteriorate, it would inform our approach when treating the other."

The full brunt of the rockslide hit Henry all at once. No amount of academia or debate could have prepared him for such an ethical dilemma. He could let Will take that initial risk, trial the antidote first, and only if it proved safe would he allow them to go ahead and treat Elizabeth. Hell, he could insist that Elizabeth receive the full dose and make Will wait for the rest to arrive by courier. He had the power to put her life first, to stop himself from making a decision that would see her die, to give her the greatest chance of survival. He could save her.

His throat bobbed with his swallow. "I understand."

And it was tempting. It was ethics-obliteratingly tempting. If Elizabeth ever found out, she'd hate him, and he could live with that, so long as she was alive to hate him.

But they were a pair; they were a gamble; they were love and hate; they were all or nothing; they were independent codependents; they were opposite ends of Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon; they were a hot mess in Sunday best; they were a pain to live with and a delight to come home to; they were hypermetropic experts in the motives and ailments of others; they were kids trying to outrun their shadows; they were Bonnie and Clyde; they were Jekyll and Hyde; they were an island; they were the bigger picture; they were devotees of the Hail Mary; they were skeptics of the faithful; they were the hardest test he had ever had to face, harder than forcing himself to walk whilst his mind screamed at him to run. But Elizabeth was right—when you've found the pattern and discovered a fundamental kind of truth, the solution was simple, maybe even elegant:

"I want you to treat them both. Now."

"Are you sure?"

"Whatever happens, they're in this together."


	12. Chapter Ten: no news is good news

**Note:** So, it looks like the site didn't show the updates again. I hope you all spotted the last few chapters that went up. Thank you to those of you who have read and reviewed.

* * *

**Chapter Ten**

**…****no news is good news.**

**Conrad**

**10:59 PM**

The door shut with a thud, and the cream and pearl stripes that contoured the Oval Office slotted back into place. Conrad braced himself against the arms of his chair, the leather warm and dented from where his elbows had rested against it, and he eased up from the seat.

He studied Russell for a long moment—the way his hold slipped from the door handle, the way his shoulders sagged, the way the seconds dragged as he turned to face him, the unbuttoned cuffs, the shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the charcoal tie that had long since been slackened—and when he could delay no longer, he dared himself to ask the question.

"Any news?"

Russell held Conrad's gaze for a second that spun to at least four times its length, and then he shook his head, just slightly, just enough to prise open a crack in the numbness that had enveloped Conrad ever since Elizabeth's DS agents had first called.

_Collapsed, poisoned, critical condition._

Each word smarted like a piece of shrapnel twisting in a wound.

Russell slumped down onto the armrest of one of the cobalt couches, and he folded his arms across his chest. When he spoke, he spoke slowly, and more gravel than usual clung to his tone. "They say the next few hours are vital. Someone'll call as soon as there's an update."

Conrad arched his eyebrows at him. "So, no news is good news?"

"That's one way to look at it."

Conrad sank back into his seat. His hand opened and closed in a fist where it hung over the edge of the armrest, and he stared at the carvings of the desk, as though the ridges and grooves of the stained oak held more than just history—held the future, held the answers, held…absolution.

His gaze darted up to Russell. "How's Henry holding up?"

Russell scratched the back of his head, and then he let his hand fall back to his side and gave a stilted shrug. "About as well as you might expect."

"And the kids?"

"Secret Service took them to the hospital. Henry wanted them there, just in case."

Conrad huffed. "You mean just in case they have to say goodbye?"

Russell stared at him for a moment, his eyes wide, and then conceded that with a small nod.

Conrad clenched his jaw, and he let his gaze wander—from the cut crystal of the decanter that sat on the coffee table, a quarter filled with the amber warmth of Scotch; to the shadows of the Secret Service agents that lurked beyond the doors to the walkway; to the chair at the edge of his desk, empty at a glance, but the longer he stared at it, not empty but straining beneath the weight of memories—and as he did, the tension deepened and it spread throughout him until he could contain it no more.

"Why her?" The question snapped through the hush. "Why Bess?"

Russell threw his arms wide. "Why anyone? Who knows what compels these people? Maybe they have a grudge, maybe they resent the fact that she polls higher than everybody else put together, maybe they just don't like what she wears. They're not rational."

"Well, it's not good enough. I want answers. Whoever did this is going to pay."

"The FBI are getting into it."

"I mean, how does someone poison the secretary of state on our own soil?" Conrad pinched his lips and shook his head to himself. "The press are going to have a field day."

"I'm liaising with State. We'll keep it under wraps for now. But if Bess doesn't make it…"

"Then the press will be the least of our concerns."

Conrad pushed himself up from his seat. He turned his back on Russell, stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets and strode past the small wooden desk, with its photographs and medals, a display of the people he cherished and the guilts he lived with, and towards the gauze curtains that veiled the dusk beyond. The longer he stared out of the window and into the spotlit grounds, the more the photographs and medals overlapped in the corner of his eye, until the borders between family and guilt could no longer be discerned.

He took a deep breath, but it stuck high in his chest, and he let it out again in a sharp sigh. "You know, Bess never wanted this job, but I told her I wouldn't take no for an answer. And I know what you might say—she could have refused, after all, since when does Bess ever do anything just because somebody's told her to? Even the President of the United States. And that might be as infuriating as all hell at times, and if she were anybody else I probably would've fired her for insubordination more than once by now, but that's one of the things I love about her."

His lips quirked into the twitch of a smile that lingered for a second, maybe two, before it faded. "No, I knew what buttons to press, I played on her guilt over leaving the CIA, because I knew that, despite what you and others might have argued to the contrary, this administration needed her."

He shook his head. "I needed her."

The stutter of the grandfather clock measured out the pause.

"And I tell myself that she knew the risks, that she was aware there was always the potential for something like this to happen, but in truth I've always known that she's never exactly been married to the idea of caution."

He spun around, and swept a hand across the room. "Hell, you've seen what she's like, flying into war zones on little more than a hope or a whim. I mean, Iran, Algeria, Libya…and even before that, when she was meant to be sat a desk at Langley, she'd drop everything to fly halfway around the world to interrogate terrorists in Iraq."

He gripped the back of his chair, his head bowed, his fingertips pitting the leather. "And perhaps that's what makes her so good at her job, that relentless commitment even in the face of danger. And perhaps if something had happened to her then, if she'd been kidnapped, if she was the one who hadn't come back alive, I could've at least kidded myself into blaming her, blaming them, blaming anyone but myself."

His gaze flicked up to meet Russell. "But that's all I'd be doing, kidding myself, because the truth is this goes back much further. It goes back to the decisions I've made. The decision to recruit her, to bring her on as secretary of state, to pick her as the one to continue my legacy… If she dies, then it doesn't really matter who poisoned her or what their reasons were. This is on me."

"Sir… You can't honestly believe that she'd hold this against you."

"She wouldn't, no. But Henry…? Their children…?" He pursed his lips and his nails dug into the leather cushion. "I will forever be the reason why he lost his wife and why they lost their mother."

Russell paused, and it looked as though he was debating whether or not to voice the thought that had flitted across his eyes. But then he shrugged and said it anyway. "And their uncle."

The huff of a laugh escaped Conrad, and he gave a wry smile. "And their uncle."

Russell skirted around the end of the couch. He held the end of his tie flat to his stomach, leant over the coffee table and unstoppered the decanter with a chink. He glugged out two fingers of Scotch into each of two of the glasses. The cut crystal of the decanter caught the cold glare of the light from the chandelier overhead. Then he passed one of the tumblers to Conrad before he held his own aloft. "To Bess."

"To Bess." Conrad echoed, and he chimed his tumbler against Russell's.

He took a sip, and then welcomed the Scotch with a wince as its bite dragged down the back of his tongue. It should have warmed him, but instead it spread through him like a layer of frost that prickled out and numbed the earth, and he stared down into the amber depths.

He saw a young blonde girl sat cross-legged on a chipped white bench, her nose buried in a French text, and he smelt the fragrance of cherry blossom whilst the petals tumbled around her like confetti on the breeze. He saw the pinch in Bess's brow tighten and the tremble of her teardrop earrings as her voice soared above his own until it reached just shy of a shout, and he heard the hush it ushered in over the Oval Office before her look softened and she added an apologetic 'sir' at the end. He saw her smile and the way that it danced in her eyes as she untucked the bundle of pink cellular blanket, and he heard the pride in her voice when she told him, 'Conrad, I'd like you to meet Stephanie'. He tasted single malt unfurling across his tongue as he sat in her living room, opposite her and Henry, and he saw the way Henry stilled the quiver in his hand by resting it against her thigh, as though that touch alone were enough to dull his fears of nuclear annihilation. He heard the crack in Henry's voice when he protested that she couldn't have gone missing in Iraq, what did that even mean, and he heard the desperation when Henry said they'd promised Stevie that Elizabeth would be back in time for her birthday. He saw the sky blue of her gloves swept up in applause, and he saw his reflection in the tint of her sunglasses when he stepped down from the podium after his inaugural speech. He felt her soft warmth as she hugged him on the ward of Walter Reed, and he smelt a note of jasmine in her fragrance that lifted him back to his days in Vietnam. He heard the tentative knock at his office door at Langley, and he saw the way that she worried the edge of the brown DL envelope clasped in her hands, but he didn't hear her apologies. He saw a woman, a wife, a mother, with her blonde hair tied back in pigtails, one hand pressed to her forehead, the other rested against a shovel, whilst his motorcade churned up the dust track that led to their home, and he smelt the pungent mix of manure and hay dust when the car door clunked open and he stepped out, ready to tell her that he expected her to move to DC—_I won't take no for an answer, Bess. I know you won't let me down._ And they both heard the words that he left unspoken—_Not this time._

Russell's cell phone rang. The trill cut through the silence. He placed his tumbler down on the desk, fished the phone out of his trouser pocket, and then frowned down at the screen.

Conrad traced the gaze from the glare of the screen to Russell's eye, and something inside of him sank. "Don't tell me. It's Henry."

Russell looked up. He gave a curt nod, more of a flinch. "Do you want to take it, or should I?"

Conrad stared back down into his glass as the tone continued to drill through him. He swirled the last of the Scotch around the bottom of the tumbler, and then tipped it back into his mouth and slammed the glass down against the desk. He met Russell's eye and held out his hand for the phone. "As I said, the buck stops with me."

He took a deep breath, and lifted the phone to his ear. "Henry, it's Conrad… How is she?"


	13. Chapter Eleven: summer vacation

**Chapter Eleven**

**…****summer vacation.**

**Elizabeth**

**Thursday, 25th October, 2018**

**12:40 AM**

Elizabeth opened her eyes and blinked. The sky stretched overhead in an endless canopy of azure, broken only by wisps of cloud so faint and delicate that they could have been airbrushed on. The grasses of the paddock surrounded her where she lay; their stalks conformed to the contours of her body as lovingly as memory foam, and they stood guard over her, just as they had done when she was a child, as though they had been waiting all this time for her to come back to them, to come back home.

Everything was perfect. It felt like the first day of summer vacation, that precise moment when you woke up and realised that there was nothing in the world you had to do. The day was yours, and the whole summer stretched before you, filled with so much opportunity and potential and freedom. All worries vanished, and your heart lifted like the canopy of a parachute.

She extended her hand towards the sky and waited for a breath of breeze to brush between her fingers. She thirsted for its touch. For those gentle strands that wound and unwound, a life current that weaved throughout the world. But the air hung still, neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor damp. Just there. Stagnant. And unease gnawed its way out from the pit of her stomach. Yes, everything was perfect. Too perfect. And somewhere in the back of her mind, an alarm clock rang, quiet and persistent and niggling with doubt. Maybe it wasn't summer vacation after all.

She propped herself up on her elbows and then eased to her feet. With one hand raised to shield her eyes from the midday glare, she peered across the paddock towards the farmhouse. The white paint of the timbers was as chipped as ever, with Virginia creeper climbing up to the eaves in shades of acid green, and that old football was still lodged in the gutter, its tanned leather faded by years of neglect and sunlight. She staggered towards the porch—the roof a patchwork of tiles both missing and present—and with her legs numbed from sleep, her steps faltered at first, but each stride gained in confidence, and soon her limbs were her own again, and as she walked, the grass tickled her soles and swished around her knees.

"Nice of you to finally join me." Will squinted at her from his perch on the top step of the porch. In the sunlight, his blue and white poly-cotton hospital gown bordered on, but fell just shy of, translucent.

Elizabeth ducked through the gap between the wooden slats of the enclosure, and then crossed the track. The gravel jabbed like shards of glass beneath her feet. She climbed the steps and sat down beside him, and then arranged the folds of her own gown so that they draped over her knees.

They stared out across the landscape in silence: the red brick stables chalky with hay dust, the paddock surrounded by its split-rail fence, the fields that rolled away beyond, the quarry with its toppled over wooden stakes and signpost black walnut tree. The air was so still that nothing moved, not even a whispered stirring amidst the leaves of the white ash trees, and it felt like time had frozen all those years ago. Though, what once was perfect, now felt empty. Not a reminder of what they had so much as what they had lost.

Elizabeth turned her head and watched Will.

After a minute or so, he met her gaze. The hint of a smile graced his lips and danced like shadows in his eyes. "I guess this is what I get for stealing your pasta." He shook his head to himself, and the smile now blossomed. "I knew I should've stuck with the salmon."

Elizabeth chuckled, but tears prickled like grit in the corners of her eyes, and though she swiped them away before they could fall, her smile remained watery. "See, this is why you should always listen to me. If you'd just picked something else like I'd said…"

"Would it make you feel better if I told you you were right?

She shook her head to herself and gave a soft snort. "No."

"Good—" He nudged her arm. "—because I wasn't planning to."

They fell back into silence. There was a certain contentment to it, an unspoken ease.

But somewhere in the distance, a faint _blip, blip, blip_ broke through. It jarred Elizabeth like the creaking of a floorboard in the middle of the night, the flutter in the belly of something being not quite right, the sense that it was just a facade, this comfort of being home. She focused on the world around her—the spiderweb spun between two of the porch posts, the fuchsias cascading over the edge of hanging basket suspended from the beam above, the wooden step worn smooth from the scuff of their shoes—and as she did, she pushed the sound from her mind. If she could just hold onto the details, tether herself to that world, to her and Will sat together now…

_Blip, blip, blip._ Her mind slipped and the sound broke back through.

She curled her fingers over the edge of the step beneath her and dug her nails into the wood. She clenched her jaw and looked to Will. "This place isn't real, is it?"

He shrugged, and his lips quirked into that smug smile of his. "Reality's just a perception."

She elbowed him in the ribs. "Don't be a smart ass; it doesn't suit you."

His smile faded. He shook his head. "No. It's just the firing of your neurones."

"And that sound?"

_Blip, blip, blip_.

"You can't stay here forever, Lizzie." He stood up and stretched, and then brushed past her and descended the steps onto the gravel track.

Her heartbeat quickened, an urgent flurry. She called after him, "What about you?"

"I'll be fine." He turned back to face her. His gaze locked on hers and his eyes narrowed. He wrinkled his nose, an expression that in a microsecond transported her back to when he was just ten years old. "Don't tell me you're scared of waking up."

"I'm not scared of waking up," she said. Overhead, a square of fluorescent light replaced the sun and grey stippled over the blue. "I'm scared that when I do, you won't be there."

He gave a half-shrug. "There're no guarantees in life."

"_Elizabeth? Can you hear me? Elizabeth?_" The voice echoed down from the sky.

"Henry?" Her gaze darted over the landscape.

"_I think she's coming round._"

"_Elizabeth, I'm Dr Owens. You're in hospital… Can you follow my finger…"_

Her eyes jerked from side to side through a series of saccades, and as they did, the world around her shattered into the fragments of a kaleidoscope. She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the edge of the step until splinters drove into the pads of her fingers and the _blip, blip, blip_ faded into the background. Not now, not yet, she wasn't ready.

"It's almost time," Will said.

She opened her eyes, and as the fragments of the world ripped away piece by piece like tiles wrenched into a tornado, she scrambled to her feet, clambered down the steps, and grabbed hold of Will's hand. "Come with me."

A sorry smile dampened his eyes. "I can't."

Behind him the fragments of the fields tore away, and left patches of aching white.

"Yes, you can." She squeezed his fingers. "Just hold my hand."

"It doesn't work like that."

The fenceposts uprooted and flung into the air, and then disappeared into the void above.

"_Elizabeth, I'm going to remove your breathing tube now. This will feel a little uncomfortable, but I'll be as quick as I can."_

"There has to be a way." Elizabeth fought back a cough, but her throat tightened and it felt as though she would choke. She doubled over. Her hands clawed and scrabbled at the base of her throat, whilst her eyes watered and stung.

Will clutched her elbow, holding her up, and he rubbed between her shoulder blades. "Don't fight it, Lizzie. Cough. And again. That's it. Now, just breathe."

She gulped in the stale air, but it held no scent. Where was the smell of horsehair and sweat, the earthiness of composted manure, the sweetness of the bales of hay? That had all been sucked from this world too. Then she looked up at him, and through the teary blur, she met his gaze. "I'm not leaving you here."

"You don't really have a choice in the matter." He offered her his arm and helped her back to standing, whilst beneath them the gravel tremored, then lifted, and like metal filings drawn to a magnet, it hurtled upwards to join the grey stippling in the sky.

She shook her head. "I've never met a situation in life where I didn't have a choice."

And for the tenth of a millisecond, the seventh floor of the State Department along with her staff and that personal stylist Russell Jackson had sent flashed across her eyes.

"Déjà vu?" His lips quirked. "That's your temporal lobe talking." Then his smile weakened. "You can't take me with you."

"Then I'll stay."

"Stay where?" He held out his arms and pivoted back and forth. All around them, grey panels hung over hazy fields of white. "This place is disintegrating."

"Then we'll rebuild it." She dragged her fingers through her hair, and they lodged in the roots. "Just tell me how, tell me what to do."

"_Elizabeth, I'm here_," Henry's voice called out to her. "_Open your eyes_."

Will's gaze narrowed on her. "Whatever happened to putting your family first?"

"You're my family too."

"And you're mine, but it's time." He clasped her hand between his and raised it to his lips, his gaze held fixed on her own. "Take care of yourself, Lizzie." He squeezed her fingers tight—

She shook her head. "No, Will, don't."

—and when the whirlwind had plucked the threads from the spider's web, prised the petals from the fuchsias, wrested the wooden boards from the steps, and finished tearing apart their home, he shot her one last smile (just one of the fourteen reasons why she'd had to learn to meditate), and then—just like that—he let go.

"Will!"

_Blip, blip, blip_. Elizabeth's gaze flittered back and forth, and everything around her blurred to grey and pink and blue._ Blip, blip, blip._ Someone stroked the hair back from her forehead, and each touch jolted through her nerve ends. _Blip, blip, blip_. "Elizabeth." Henry. His voice. "Elizabeth, it's okay. It's me. I'm here. You're in hospital."

Elizabeth opened her eyes and blinked. The ceiling stretched overhead in a perpetual wasteland of flint, disrupted only by the slabs of fluorescent light so harsh that they made her head thump with each photon. The plastic of the wires and lines and tubes surrounded her where she lay; they ran in and out of her body like the strings of a puppet, and they fed into the machines and bags and pumps that controlled her and monitored her every move.

"Madam Secretary." A man with short, dark hair stepped into her vision. "I'm Dr Owens. You're in hospital. You suffered a number of seizures and fell into a short coma, but you're doing well. All your vitals are looking good and we've successfully removed your breathing tube. We've had to give you a lot of medication though, so everything's going to feel a bit strange."

_"__Will?"_ Elizabeth tried to say, but her throat burned like gravel in an open wound. She turned her head and the world around her pitched and rolled until she anchored her gaze on Henry. She grasped for his hand, and when his fingers wrapped around hers, she squeezed tight and stared up into his eyes. "_Will?_" she tried again, but only her lips moved.

Henry perched on the edge of the bed. He raised her hand to his lips. "He's alive. Will's alive. But they're still treating him."

"We believe that you and your brother were poisoned," Dr Owens said. "We've managed to bring your brother's seizures under control, but he still hasn't woken up." He stopped speaking, but his mouth remained open, and the unspoken words hung in the air, waiting to take shape.

Elizabeth's gaze lolled back to Henry, with the pinch in his brow and the concern in his eyes. She squeezed his hand again. "_Tell me._"

Henry looked to Dr Owens and nodded. "Tell her."

"Your brother ingested a much higher dose of the poison and it took us far longer to get his seizures under control. That placed a huge amount of stress on his body and his brain, and though we're giving him all the support that we can, we don't know at this stage whether or not he'll pull through." Dr Owens's lips tugged into a flat line. "I'm sorry. We'll keep doing everything we can."

Elizabeth's whole body ached, crushed in the grip of the same inescapable inevitability she had felt that night she had stood on the bottom step of the porch and watched the police car, not her father's charcoal grey Buick, roll along the gravel track and pull up outside the house. Only, the roots of this ache embedded themselves much deeper, like a parasitic plant wrapping around and then infiltrating its host. That night was bad luck, it was senseless, it was enough to convince her that the world was unfair and there was no such thing as a benevolent God, but this… This was her fault. She was the target, not Will. She was his big sister; she was meant to protect him, and if she hadn't been so worried about the stupid election, if she hadn't been so eager to win him over to her side, she would have made him eat the salmon—the dry, plain, untainted salmon—and he would have been fine. She had made a promise that night thirty-five years ago, a promise to care for him and to put him first, and maybe a more rational mind would appreciate that bad things happen and that's just the way it goes, but every fibre of her being was left bruised as the roots lodged themselves in her soul. She had failed—failed herself, failed him, failed their parents—and it wasn't a test she could retake or a slip in a calculation that she could go back and undo. This was life. This was death. But it wasn't meant to happen like this. It wasn't meant to happen so soon.

"I'll keep you updated," Dr Owens said. "In the meantime, try and get some rest. I'll come back to check up on you in a little bit." He flashed Elizabeth and Henry a taut smile and then retreated from the room.

Henry brushed his thumb back and forth across her knuckles, and he leant in and pressed his forehead to hers. "I'm here, you hear me?" He stared into her eyes, the look so close that maybe he could read her mind and see the tangle in her soul. "We'll get through this."

She cupped his cheek and held him there; the cannula in the back of her hand tugged as she moved. She tried to speak, but managed only a strangled whisper. "I can't lose him, Henry. I just—" She choked, and closed her eyes, but the tears leaked through.

"I know." He held her head in both hands and kissed her forehead. "I know."

He shifted on the bed so that they sat side by side, with his legs swung up next to hers. He rearranged the lines and leads that fed her oxygen, nourished her veins and tracked her heart, and then wrapped his arm around her shoulders and coaxed her to rest her head against his chest. He stroked her hair and hushed her, but her body refused to relax.

Outside in the corridor, just beyond the sliding glass doors, Alison and Stevie were curled up at either end of a thin-cushioned couch, their heads propped against the armrests. Someone, maybe Henry, maybe one of the DS agents who stood guard, had covered them with powder pink blankets—cellular cotton like those only found in nurseries and hospitals—and, though asleep, they both wore pinched frowns. In between them, with his head leant back against the wall behind and his arms folded loosely across his chest, sat Will— No, Jason. That was right, Jason. A boy with so much passion and no direction, a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue, an answer to everything, a look of 'butter wouldn't melt', who was quick with a smile but slow to trust. That was Jason, right? Or was it—

"Will?" Elizabeth whispered.

Henry's hand against her hair stilled. His body tensed. "He's not Will."

She gave a half-nod. "I know."

But she continued to study him. In the dimmed light of the corridor…

Henry eased off the bed and padded out through the doorway. He touched Jason's forearm, just hard enough for Jason to flinch awake and blink as though dazed. Henry's lips moved, and Jason turned to the glass and caught Elizabeth's eye, and then looked up at Henry—lost. But then Henry tilted his head towards the room, and Jason faltered to his feet, and with Henry's hand steering his shoulder, he edged towards the bed while his fingers fumbled over the cuffs of his plaid shirt.

Henry met Elizabeth's gaze, and something in his eyes said, 'Look, he's Jason, not Will.'

Henry nudged Jason, and Jason perched at the edge of the bed. He cast his gaze over all the tubes and wires, and then offered Elizabeth a weak smile. "You're awake… I mean, you were kinda awake before, but your eyes were all empty like you were somewhere else… But you're here now."

Elizabeth nodded, and tried to force a smile. But then the tears broke through and she clasped her hand over her nose and mouth.

A look of panic swept across Jason's face, and he glanced at Henry, but Henry gave him a firm nod, and Jason turned back to Elizabeth and wrapped his arms around her, though only loosely, as though afraid she might shatter.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Elizabeth whispered. She clung to him and bunched the back of his shirt in her fists. She inhaled his scent and it washed through her like the fluids that coursed through her veins, and it hit her: Henry was right, this was her baby boy, this was Jason. Will was…

"Mom, it's okay." Jason smoothed tentative circles over Elizabeth's shoulder blades. "Everything's going to be okay."

Elizabeth nodded. "I'll fix it. I promise I'll fix it."

Everything would be okay. She would make it okay. All she had to do was find a way to fix Will.

* * *

**Note:** So that brings us to the end of the first part. I hope you're enjoying the story so far. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave a review. I think all the writers here will agree when I say that feedback is invaluable and so very much appreciated.

Seeing as this point acts as a natural break, I wanted to ask: would you like a breather or would you like me to keep posting? Let me know. Ta.


	14. Chapter Twelve: holding her hand

**Note: **So, welcome to the second part of this story. You may notice that the style and pace shift a little. When writing the piece, I called the middle chapters 'stepping stones' or 'snapshots'. I think you'll see why. Happy reading! And once again, thank you for all your reviews!

* * *

**Chapter Twelve**

**…****holding her hand.**

**Henry**

**Monday, 29th October, 2018**

**11:13 AM**

Beneath the cloak of disinfectant, the ward smelt of blood, vomit, faeces, urine and sweat, all the effluvia of life woven together to form the stench of death, whilst the beeps and clicks and blips and whooshes and moans spun themselves into a kind of medical lullaby that played in the background as Will slept. Or in any case, this world's version of sleep, where the definition had been tweaked to include the complete absence of the ability to see, feel, speak, hear or move. But he looked peaceful at least, blissfully unaware of the perpetual waking nightmare that was the ICU.

Henry held onto Elizabeth's hand and watched her as she peered absently through the wall of glass. Her eyes were vacant, and the air around her teemed with a fog of unspoken thoughts. With the way that her cardigan draped from the angles of her shoulders and drifted over the empty folds of her washed-out Peter Frampton tee, and with the way that her navy blue sweatpants barely hung from the jut of her hips, he couldn't escape the feeling that he was both holding her up and tethering her down. In a moment, he would have to let go, and when he did, would she collapse beneath her own weight, or would she be whisked away like an autumn leaf, brittle and fragile and tumbling on the breeze?

"We don't have to do this now. We can always come back later if you want."

But Elizabeth shook her head, her gaze never leaving Will.

Henry hesitated. He wished he knew the right thing to say or do. But at the moment, everything felt like an empty promise, a vague reassurance or just another platitude. He would have squeezed her hand and attempted to offer her that comfort at least, but to do so would only press on her bruise. "Okay… Well, I'll be right here if you need me."

She nodded, yet still she clung to him.

He studied her for a minute longer, and then eased closer and brushed his lips against the hairline of her temple. Her eyes slipped shut and her grip on his hand tightened. Her expression turned pained. It looked as though she was trying to pinch back a fresh wave of tears. She rested her head against his shoulder and nestled up to him just long enough for the scent of her coconut shampoo to wash over him and provide a brief respite from the miasma of the ward. Then she drew in a deep breath that rattled through her, her whole body trembling in that breeze, and as it escaped in a sigh that shook through her lips, her grip on his fingers loosened and she let go.

Her hands disappeared into the ends of her cardigan sleeves and she drifted towards the glass doors. She pressed the button on the wall, her gaze ever-fixed on Will where he lay on the bed in the middle of the room. The doors swooshed open, and for a moment, she hovered there, on the brink. Then, just as the door began to judder shut again, she stepped through.

Henry waited outside. When Elizabeth lowered herself onto the stone blue armchair next to Will's bed, he did likewise and sank down onto the flimsy cushion of one of the teal chairs that backed onto the nurses' station at the centre of the ward. The arrangement of those glass-walled rooms around the central desk reminded him of a panopticon; it made observation easier—that was the purpose of its design—but it also pointed to the fact that most of the patients were trapped in their own prison of sorts. He leant forward with his elbows propped on top of his knees, his fingers steepled against his lips. In his own way, he felt trapped too.

After the stalker incident, he had sworn that he would never let himself feel that powerless again, yet here he was once more. This violation went deeper, though. The person responsible hadn't left threats or made demands or hacked into the electronics of their home. They had come without warning, they had gone straight in for the kill, they had tampered with the circuits of their brains. No one had seen it coming, and at any point they could strike again. But as Elizabeth clutched Will's hand atop the bed, their fingers so gaunt and pale, their knuckles peaking through the skin, the back of her hand one billowing bruise, it was clear that regardless of what happened next, the damage had already been done. Physical recovery was one thing, but what if she lost him?

He had berated her for her decision over Dmitri—the decision that she had described as impossible—but what of his own ethical dilemma? Should he have delayed her treatment and given Will the antidote first? Maybe then they both would have pulled through. Or maybe Will was already too far gone. Or maybe the antidote would have killed him. Or maybe, just maybe, the God's honest truth was that—even knowing what he knew now—he could never have brought himself to prioritise Will over Elizabeth, because holding someone's hand whilst they lay motionless on the ICU was a world away from holding their hand on the opposite side of the glass. Did that make him selfish? Or had he done what anyone in that situation would do? He had given them both a chance, an equal chance. He had thought it would be either life or death for the both of them, but now he was back to where he was when news broke of the coup in Iran, unable to help, unsure what would happen next, deep in the unnavigable murk of the in-between. And there was nothing that he could do, except to hold her hand as she held Will's, to pray that sunlight would burn through this gloom, and to wait, just wait.

"Henry." Conrad's voice broke through his thoughts.

Henry rose to his feet and turned towards the double doors that opened onto the ICU. "Conrad. Russell." He nodded to them as they strode along the corridor, between the Secret Service agents and DS agents who were stationed every three metres or so.

"Just thought we'd stop by." Conrad offered Henry a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, and then he nodded through the glass at Will. "How's he doing?"

"No change." Henry led them a step closer to the glass wall of Will's room as a nurse bustled past in a rustle of pink scrubs and cast them a lingering look.

Conrad's smile faded. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"He's had the maximum dose of antidote, but they gave him so much other medication to stop the seizures…they just don't know what's going on." Henry rubbed his brow and then let his hand fall back to his side. "It's just a case of wait and see."

"Well, we're all praying for him."

Henry gave a nod. Funny that, how religion filled the gaps left by medicine, yet still most doctors acted as though they were God.

Conrad opened his mouth but then paused, as though reconsidering what he was about to say. His gaze darted towards the room, to the figure hunched in the chair at the bedside. "And how's Elizabeth?"

Ah, so that's why they were there.

Henry stared through the glass. One question, a million ways to answer it. "Her doctor says she should make a full recovery, and he discharged her this morning. She's still exhausted though, and the headaches haven't gone away yet, but apparently that's normal after seizures like this."

Elizabeth pushed her weight into the armrests and eased up from the chair, and then she hugged her cardigan around her and perched on the edge of the bed. She took Will's hand again.

"Jesus—" Russell stepped up to the glass, his hands on his hips, whilst he gawped at Elizabeth as though he were watching a newly-discovered creature on display at a zoo. He spun back to face Henry. "I thought this was meant to be a hospital, not the Gulag." He lowered his voice when a passing nurse shot him a glare. "Haven't they been feeding her?"

Henry's jaw tensed. "She's also extremely nauseous—another side effect of the seizures and the antidote and God knows what else they gave her."

"We're trying to sell the press on '_nothing to see here_'. How do you think that's going to go down when she steps out there looking like that?" Russell thrust a finger in Elizabeth's direction.

"You try being up to your eyeballs in benzodiazepines and keeping food down."

Russell held his hands out wide, and his eyes bugged. "So get her some Ensure."

"She nearly died, Russell," Henry shouted, and inside the room Elizabeth flinched, as though he had hammered a fist against the glass. "And her brother…her brother's…" He rubbed at his mouth and shook his head to himself. His gaze flitted back to Russell's. "Right now she's entitled to feel like crap. So why don't you just focus on finding out who did this to them, and let me worry about looking after her."

A silence spread through the hallway and pulsed with the echo of his words.

Russell shared a look with Conrad. With his eyebrows ever so slightly raised, he looked like a terrier seeking permission before making the kill. When Conrad nodded, Russell pivoted back to face Henry. His voice dragged. "On that note…"

Henry frowned and glanced between the two of them. "Why do I feel like I ought to be bracing myself?"

"The FBI want to speak to her."

"_Now_?"

"Not right this second." Russell gave him a look as though to say even he wasn't that unreasonable. His cell phone bleeped in his suit jacket pocket. He checked it quickly, and then stuffed it away again and met Henry's eye. "We were thinking later this afternoon."

Henry shook his head. "No. No way. She's not strong enough."

"Look, I get that you want to protect her—"

"I said she's not ready, Russell."

Russell held up his hands. "I hear you."

Henry gripped the back of his neck; his fingers dug into the knots of his spine. "They must have something else they can go on, something that doesn't involve questioning her just days after she's come out of a coma." When neither Conrad nor Russell replied, his eyes narrowed and his gaze bounced back and forth between them. "They do have something to go on, don't they?"

"What can I say?" Russell shrugged. "Turns out that everyone and their mother has access to diasiozin, so that doesn't exactly narrow down the pool of suspects."

Conrad arched his eyebrows and his lips tugged into a taut line. "All the effort foreign powers put into creating an untraceable poison, and turns out all you really need is a prescription."

"So, you're seriously telling me they don't have any leads?"

Russell gave a slight shake of the head. "Not yet."

"Then how can you be sure she's safe? How long until whoever did this realises it didn't work and they come back and try again?" Henry gestured towards the doors of the ICU, as though whoever was responsible might storm through at any second. Although, if they did storm through, at least this time there would be a chance of stopping them. No, whoever did this had snuck in and snuck out, like a hacker installing a rootkit.

"We're stepping up her security—"

"Oh yeah, because they were so much help last time. If Will hadn't ingested most of the dose, she would have been dead before anyone even realised what was happening."

"What did you expect them to do? Test all her food for her?" Russell's gaze drifted back to Elizabeth where she teetered on the edge of the bed as though a single puff of air would see her topple. "Though I guess that isn't such a concern right now…"

"Is that your idea of glass half full? She might not be able to stomach a meal, but at least they won't be able to poison her through her food?" Henry shook his head to himself and turned his back on them, his jaw clenched to bite back whatever words might follow.

Across the other side of the ward, the nurses dipped in and out of the boxlike rooms. They paused only to silence the bleeping of the machines or to check the bags hung from the IV poles, and they passed by the patients as though they were just another object, part of the landscape of the ICU, not living, breathing beings who had once teemed with life.

"Look, we all want to get to the bottom of this," Russell said, "and that's why it's important that they talk to her."

"What about the restaurant?" Henry faced them again. "Surely they can start there."

Russell's gaze flitted to Conrad before he spoke. "That's one line of investigation, but it sounds like anyone could've had access and there's a lot of cash in hand going on so the staff are proving hard to trace, not to mention all the diners without reservations and anyone else who could've walked in off the street."

"Then what about her detail?" Henry nodded towards the agents stationed along the corridor, though none of them were from Elizabeth's usual security team. "Talk to them first."

"Already have, but she's the only one who went inside the restaurant itself." Russell paused, and then shrugged. "Well, her and her brother, but we're not going to get much out of him."

Henry's eyebrows shot up. "Seriously?" An involuntary laugh escaped him, the kind that left a person winded. "Do you get a kick out of being callous, or is that some kind of pathological reflex?"

Conrad buried his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on the balls of his feet, just enough for his presence to place a wedge between Henry and Russell. "Henry, I know this is difficult, but right now there are a lot of questions and not many answers. If Elizabeth has any information, anything at all, it could prove crucial in solving this." He studied Henry for a long second, as though he were trying to suss him out, to read him the same way that Elizabeth read people. "You want to catch who did this, don't you?"

"Of course. But not at the risk of her health." Henry's gaze returned to Elizabeth as she shivered and pulled her cardigan tighter around her, despite the unvarying warmth of the ward—not pleasant like the glow of a fire or the kiss of sunlight, but something altogether unnatural, the kind of heat that crept over the skin and latched on.

"I'll tell them to keep it informal," Conrad said. "No hard questions."

Henry shook his head slightly. "She just needs a little time to get her strength up, a few more days." He looked to them, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed back the thickness that had settled there. "Look, I can't do much for her, just be here with her and hold her hand. At least let me give her the space to grieve and to come to terms with this."

Conrad placed a hand on Henry's shoulder, like he would have one of the young men in his battalion as they stood on the cusp of their first battle and peered into the abyss. "I hear you, Henry, and I wouldn't ask this of either you or Bess if it wasn't important, but in a few more days this person could've gone to ground, destroyed any evidence or fled the country, that is if they haven't already." He paused, and then his hand retreated and he rolled his shoulders back, a shift to president mode. "They can conduct the interview here on the ward, and you can stay with her. If she's getting tired or if it's too much, I promise they'll stop, no judgement." He dipped to catch Henry's gaze. "Does that sound like a plan?"

And it was tempting to say no, as though to do so would give him just a glimmer of the power that he yearned for. But that glimmer would be as false as the fluorescent daylight that shone throughout the ward, empty and lacking in nourishment. It wouldn't make Will wake up, it wouldn't take away Elizabeth's pain, it wouldn't burn out this darkness that had infiltrated their lives, and he would have no more control than he did with the stalker or when waiting for news from Iran. He wanted to say no just so that he'd at least feel like he was helping her in some small way, but maybe he had to give up the little power that he clung to; maybe by letting the FBI do their jobs, he could prevent them from finding themselves in this situation again, only next time with him sat on the other side of the glass as the medical lullaby hushed Elizabeth in her endless sleep.

Henry gave a reluctant nod. "Fine."

"Good." Russell clasped his hands together. "I'll set it up." He plucked his phone from the pocket of his suit jacket, scrolled down the screen, and then paused to cast Henry a look over the rim of his glasses. "Oh, and they'll want to speak to her brother's family too, check their home and devices, see who had access to his schedule. It's possible someone used a connection to him in order to get to her."

"His partner's in London at the moment, and their daughter has a nasty ear infection so they can't fly. But I can find out where they're staying and pass on their details."

Russell stepped away and pressed the phone to his ear.

Conrad offered Henry a taut smile. "And if there's anything we can do, anything at all, you know where we are."

Henry didn't return the smile, just stepped up to the pane of glass and watched Elizabeth as she bowed her head and ran her thumb back and forth over the knuckles of Will's limp hand. Her hair swept forward into her face, her body shuddered and she blotted her eyes with the cuff of her cardigan sleeve. How was he meant to help her? What could he do to bring her comfort, something more than just waiting with her and holding her hand?

"Chamomile tea."

Henry spun around. "What?"

Russell slipped his cell phone back into his jacket pocket. "For the nausea. Try giving her some chamomile tea. Carol sometimes recommends it to her patients." He shrugged. "It might help."

"Oh…" Henry tried to fight off his dazed expression. "Thanks, Russell."

Russell hesitated for a moment, and then tapped Henry's elbow, the briefest of connections. "Take care of her, Henry."

Then, with a slight hunch in his shoulders that said perhaps he did feel the full weight of the situation after all, he turned and walked away.


	15. Chapter Thirteen: the kid with the no

**Chapter Thirteen**

**…****the kid with the nose.**

**Elizabeth**

**2:36 PM**

"I always hated the attention Mom and Dad gave you. I could get straights As, be the top of my grade, make captain of the hockey team and the lacrosse team, and they wouldn't bat an eyelid, all because they were too busy watching you, waiting for your next move.

"There was always something going on, whether it was tying that boy, the one in your class, the one with the nose…Why can't I remember his name...? Anyway, whether it was tying that boy to the tree in the playground in third grade; or instigating a walkout in gym class because you said it was 'cruel and unusual' to expect kids to do circuits at nine o'clock on a Monday morning; or leaving the backdoor open because you were too busy showing off to your friends, and Billy the Kid getting in and eating the corner of Mom's favourite shirt, not to mention all the apples and all those old boxes of Punch Crunch that were in the larder, and then him ending up with the worst diarrhoea known to goat-kind… They were right to make you clean that up, by the way.

"I just wanted them to notice me for once. But looking back, I can see how growing up out of the spotlight shaped me, how it made me who I am today. It gave me a craving for validation from authority, perhaps not the healthiest trait, but I think it's served me pretty well. It taught me that you don't need praise in order to achieve, and that sometimes it's the things you do that no one else recognises that are most worthwhile. It showed me what I wanted to be like as a parent and it made me certain that when I grew up I'd have a home where everyone was treated equally and no one was overlooked, or at least that was the plan. Turns out some kids will always demand more attention than others, and then any notions of equality go flying out the window. But most importantly, it taught me how to deal with a crisis, because believe me, you were one crisis after another. Talking the Russians down from the brink of nuclear war is nothing compared to that time Mom had to talk Mrs Stevens down from suspending you after you edited all the math textbooks to include a 't' in the middle of 'mensuration'.

"And this—now—this is just another crisis. And fortunately, after all those years of watching Mom and Dad dealing with you, crisis is my specialty, so I promise I'll find a way to fix this, I promise I'll find a way to fix you."

The glass doors behind Elizabeth swished open. She flinched and let go of Will's hand, and swivelled around in the armchair at the side of his bed.

Henry stood in the doorway, one hand pressed to the button on the wall to prevent the doors from sliding shut again. His gaze flitted over her, the visual equivalent of all those physical exams the doctors had insisted on repeating again and again, before he met her eye. "They're here."

"Okay." Elizabeth clutched the fronts of her cardigan together. She eased to her feet and turned around to rest one knee against the cushion of the chair. "Are they coming to the room?"

"They're in the conference room at the end of the ward." He tilted his head to one side and motioned down the corridor towards the entrance of the ICU.

She picked at the seam of the backrest. "So…they're not coming here?"

His mouth hung open. His eyes held a look of mild panic.

Her fingers stilled over the stitches. "Because when you said they were coming to the ward…"

Henry glanced behind him, towards the nurses who hovered at the curved desk of the nurses' station and whose ears pricked at every word, and then he stepped into the room, and as he released the button, the door swooshed shut. He ran one hand through his hair and shook his head, his movements reflected in the glass. "They can't conduct the interview in here."

Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, the words on the precipice of her tongue—_Why not?_

But before those words could fall, he cut in, "It's not appropriate and it's not private." He took hold of her hand atop the backrest and rubbed his thumb over her fingers; his gaze lingered on the shades of purple and green and grey that diffused like the billow of a steam train across the tracks of her tendons. "I know you want to stay here with Will, but it won't take long, I promise. And you could use a break from this room."

"Will doesn't get a break." And just saying those words refreshed the ache that clung to her every muscle and nerve and bone.

A shadow fell across Henry's eyes. He cradled her head in both hands and drew her closer until his lips grazed her hairline. "I know." Then he ran his hands down to her shoulders and pulled back enough to search her eyes. "If you'd rather not do this, if you're not ready to talk to them—"

She shook her head, and the wisps of her hair tickled her cheeks. "They won't leave me alone until I do." Her lips twitched into a glum smile. "Not that I'll be much help anyway."

He squeezed her shoulders. "How's the headache?"

She stepped around the armchair, slipped her hand into his, and they ambled towards the glass doors. "Do you remember that night we went out with Shane before his wedding?"

"No." He chuckled. "No one does." He pressed the button on the wall, waited for the swoosh, and then led her out onto the corridor. "But I remember the hangover."

She tugged at his hand, urging him to stop and turn to face her. "Well, this makes that look like a trip to the day spa." The corners of her lips attempted to tweak upwards, but they fell flat, and the momentary levity in Henry's expression withered too. She shook her head to herself, the ends of her hair trembling, and then she let go of his hand and walked on.

Henry's elbow bumped against hers as he walked at her side. His gaze flitted from the stretch of corridor ahead back to her every other second or so. "Maybe we should speak to Dr Owens again, see if he can prescribe you something."

"No." She hugged her arms across her chest. Then, in a murmur, she added, "No more medication."

Will had joined them that night before Shane's wedding too. He, Elizabeth, Shane and Henry had split from the rest of the group at around midnight, leaving Shane's friends in the grungy bar in the centre of Pittsburgh whilst they staggered off into the hazy glow of the streetlights with the intention of getting Shane back to his and Henry's parents' house to sleep off the liquor before his nuptials.

Or at least, that had been their plan.

On the way back, they came across a travelling carnival pitched on the old football field; its neon lights radiated across the night sky and its calliope music piped up into the smoky air. Will had grabbed hold of Elizabeth's hand, and before she knew it, she and the others were sucked into the throng of bodies that swarmed between the candy-coloured stalls.

They squeezed through the teenage cliques, the pastel shades of cotton candy, the cries and jeers of the carnies, the dinging of bells, the echoes of laughter, the mouthwatering smell of hotdogs and the intoxicating scent of doughnuts saturated with oil and glistening with crystals of sugar, and they headed towards the far side, where a vertical drop slide towered over the whole site.

Will arched an eyebrow at Elizabeth and tilted his head towards the slide.

But she shook her head and backed away.

Will wrinkled his nose. "Don't tell me you're scared of a slide."

"I'm not scared of a slide," Elizabeth said. "I'm scared that I'll break something."

"Then it's a good thing I'm a doctor."

"You're not a doctor, you're pre-med."

"Henry, tell your wife to lighten up, will you?"

Henry grabbed Elizabeth by the waist, and she squealed and squirmed as he tickled her beneath her ribs. He whispered in her ear, his breath fanning across her cheek, hot and laced with the scent of Scotch. "Come on, babe. Live for today, remember?"

And in a few days he would be gone again and who knew if he would return, so she trusted her hand to his and let him lead her up the steep steps to the top of the slide.

When they reached the summit, she sat on the cusp of the drop and clung to the bar above, and the cold metal with its flecks of rust bit into her palms. The puffs of breath that escaped her lips fogged up in white plumes, whilst the lights and music swam before her and mixed with the alcohol that already hazed through her mind, and as she gazed down across the carnival, something inside her tightened, like a spring coiling and storing up potential.

Henry slotted behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He pressed a wet kiss to her cheek, and then whispered, "Ready?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath, the spring at maximal stress, then she nodded, and as he nudged them forward, her fingers slipped from the bar above and she let go. She screamed as they hurtled down the slide, the cold air whipping through her hair and lashing at her skin, whilst all the lights and music around them blurred as though the world were a photograph taken with slow exposure, and in a rush the spring released, and it felt as though she could fly, and if this was the high that Henry found in the cockpit, she got it—why he wanted to be a fighter pilot—and as she soared, giddy and fizzling, she wished she could capture that moment, bottle it—a champagne explosion in reverse—and preserve it in all its intensity. Forever.

Elizabeth landed with a thump in the balding turf at the foot of the slide. The fug of laughter, neon fireflies, twice-breathed air and the promise of the frost to come waltzed around her head.

Henry scrambled off the end of the slope and knelt by her side. "Babe, you okay?"

Elizabeth eased herself to sitting, the world still akilter, then she grasped the front of Henry's sweat-and-beer-stained tee and tugged him in for a searing kiss. Henry froze at first, but then melted into her, and the carnival around them faded away into the chorus of wolf-whistles. When they broke apart, she smiled at his dazed expression and nodded towards the slide. "Let's do that again."

"See." Will met her with a grin wide enough to rival her own. "I told you it'd be fun."

Later, when the crowds started to dwindle and the smell of exhaust fumes overwhelmed everything else, Elizabeth linked arms with Will, and following Henry and Shane, they stumbled off into the night, buzzing from that high and reeling with insuppressible laughter. Half an hour later, they had made it back to Henry's parents' house, and in a fit of giggles, they dumped Shane in his room before disappearing into Henry's old bedroom. Henry and Elizabeth crashed down onto the cosy confines of the single bed, whilst Will passed out on a quilt on the floor. Henry nestled against her and pressed kisses to the back of her neck, and as Elizabeth watched over her snoring brother, she whispered, "Thank you for inviting him."

"Of course," Henry said. "We're family."

"Family," Elizabeth said. "I've missed that."

"Well, now you're stuck with it."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." His lips curled against her skin. "I'm rather fond of you, Mrs McCord."

Family, she repeated to herself as she closed her eyes and the afterglow of the carnival whirled through her mind. And for the first time in years, as she succumbed to sleep she didn't think about the family she had lost or the family she and Henry might never get the chance to have, but of the family she had today, gathered within those walls. It was a precious thing to have people to call your own.

And it was family who, at seven o'clock sharp, heralded the worst hangover of their lives. Or Maureen at least, with the slamming of the adjacent bedroom door.

But, yes, this headache was far worse. Neon bulbs had been replaced by fluorescent panels; pastel tones by dingy decor; heady scents by nauseating odours; calliope music by rhythmic blips; spirited laughter by patients' groans; raucous cries by stoic silence. And as for the boy who had been passed out on the bedroom floor…?

No. Medication wouldn't quite cut it. Not unless it could take them back to that time, to that precise moment when she had burned with life, that precise moment that she would have given anything to preserve.

Henry stopped outside the door to the conference room, and turned to face Elizabeth. He touched his hand to her elbow and looked down into her eyes. "If it gets too much, if you want to stop… Just don't push yourself, okay?"

Elizabeth nodded. She placed her hand against the cool metal panel and pushed open the door. The sound of laughter rushed out, like the harrowing echoes that linger over an abandoned fairground, and it jarred through her as harsh as a pinched nerve after the sombre hush of the ward.

The two agents fell silent, and they stood up so sharply that the feet of their chairs screeched across the linoleum floor. Their expressions sobered, and they nodded to Elizabeth and Henry. "Madam Secretary. Dr McCord."

Elizabeth pulled out one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table and sank down onto the cushion. Henry gripped the back of her chair whilst he leant across to shake the agents' hands.

"I'm Agent Hayes, and this is Agent Perez." The taller of the two men extended his hand to Elizabeth, but when she made no move to shake it, he retreated and motioned for his colleague to sit down again instead, whilst a slight blush rose through his cheeks—faint salmon to match his tie.

He fumbled in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced his cell phone, tapped a couple of buttons and then slid it to the middle of the table. He glanced up at Elizabeth over the wiry rims of his glasses. "We'll be recording this interview today, if that's all right."

Elizabeth eyed him, and then nodded.

Henry took the seat at her side. He patted her thigh—a reminder that he was there with her, or perhaps he could sense the simmering beneath her surface and hoped to dampen it—and then he rested his hands in his lap.

Elizabeth continued to stare at Agent Hayes. Her eyes narrowed on him as he shuffled through several pieces of paper. She cleared her throat. "I take it from the fact that you're here to interview me just hours after I've been discharged and while my brother is still down the hall in a coma means that you don't have any leads regarding who poisoned us."

Agent Hayes's mouth hung open, and his gaze darted to Agent Perez and then to Henry before it settled on Elizabeth. "Um…we're looking into a number of possible leads…" He looked again to Agent Perez, and Perez gave a tentative nod. "But we thought that your input would be useful at this juncture."

"Right." Elizabeth nodded, slowly, and she let her gaze drift as though she were mulling over Fermat's Last Theorem. Then she folded her arms on top of the table and leant into them, so that her chair tipped forward and the back legs lifted from the ground. Her gaze sharpened on Hayes. "See, what I'm hearing when you say that is that you really don't have a clue—"

"Elizabeth." Henry laid his hand against her arm.

But she jerked her arm free, still staring at Hayes. "—yet you think it's appropriate to come here, to an ICU, and sit around laughing while most of the patients here might never wake up let alone laugh ever again. So you'll have to forgive me if I seem a little less than thrilled to be sat here with you today, but perhaps if you took the situation a little more seriously, then you'd actually have some leads, and rather than coming to ask me questions, you'd have some answers for me and you'd be able to tell me who did this to me and my brother."

The clock on the wall above Agent Hayes _clonk…clonk…clonked_ out the silence.

Each second throbbed through Elizabeth's skull.

Hayes placed his palms flat against the table and looked Elizabeth square in the eye; though his index finger twitched, and his gaze flinched just a little. "I apologise, ma'am, and I'm sorry for what you and your family are going through. I assure you that we, and everyone at the bureau, take this matter incredibly seriously."

Elizabeth stared at him for a beat longer, until the throb in her head subsided to a pulse, and then she gave him a curt nod. "Good." She leant back in the chair and massaged her temples. "Now, let's get on with this, shall we? I'd like to get back to my brother."

Hayes retrieved a pen from his inside jacket pocket and opened up his notebook, whilst Perez did likewise. He reached for the phone in the middle of the table, unlocked the screen and hit the record button. "As discussed with President Dalton, we'll keep this interview informal, and if at any point you need to take a break, just let us know."

Elizabeth nodded.

"We'd like you to talk us through what happened that day in as much detail as possible. Anything at all you can remember, even if it seems inconsequential."

Elizabeth drummed her fingers against the wooden armrest, and she watched them as they moved as though she were hypnotised by the pattern. _Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum._ The beat reverberated through her, up her arm, across the ridge of her shoulder, along the curve of her neck and into her skull, until the pulsation in her head fell into perfect synchrony…or perhaps it was the other way around, perhaps it was the pulsation that ran out of her skull, down through her neck, across her shoulder, along her arm and sought release through the beat in her hand. _Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum._

She stopped and looked up at Hayes. "I can't remember." Her gaze dipped to the table and landed halfway between the phone and the edge nearest the agents. "I got into the elevator at the office…and then I woke up in hospital the following morning. Everything between that is…" After a moment or so of silence, she shook her head to herself, paused, and then returned to drumming her fingers. _Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_.

"Okay." Hayes glanced at Perez.

Perez leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows atop the table. "Let's start by talking about the restaurant. Can you remember what time you arrived?"

_Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_. "No."

"Do you recall anything about the member of staff who greeted you?"

_Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_. "No."

"What about where you sat?"

_Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_. "I don't know."

"Were you near the front or the back…?"

_Ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_. "I don't know."

"Madam Secretary, if you could just take your time, there's no rush."

Elizabeth's gaze shot up to Perez. "I said I don't know."

Perez shrank back from the table. "All right then."

Hayes held his pen poised over the blank page of his notebook. Ink beaded on the nib, impatient for an answer. "Do you remember what food you ordered?"

The back of Elizabeth's neck tensed and the thud in her head grew louder, like war drums resounding, not to rally the troops, but to drown out their flurry of fear. The beat of her fingers quickened to match. _Ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum_. "No."

"What about the people who served you? Can you remember any details of what they looked like? Anything at all?"

_Ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum_. "No."

"Did anyone approach your table during the meal?"

_Ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum_. "I don't know."

"Did you take anything with you into the restaurant? Wine? Takeaway coffee? A bottle of water, maybe?"

The pulse in her head shot out sparks, incendiary arrows that rained down, and she squeezed her eyes shut. _Ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum-ta-rum_. "I don't know."

Henry caught hold of her hand and laced his fingers through hers, forcing them to still. "Look, this isn't getting us anywhere. My wife was critically ill, she's still recovering, she needs to rest."

"Dr McCord, I understand," Agent Hayes said, "but any information the secretary has could be crucial for this investigation."

"She said she doesn't remember."

Elizabeth massaged her brow and then, when the sparks had dwindled to a shower, she blinked open her eyes and squeezed Henry's hand. "I'm going back to the room. Will's doctor'll be there soon and I need to talk to him about options."

She eased up from the chair.

"Madam Secretary." Hayes leapt to his feet and arched his fingers against the table. "If you could just answer a few more questions."

Elizabeth shook her head, and she slipped through the gap between her and Henry's chairs. "I can't remember anything. It's all just…white noise."

"Then let's focus on what you do remember, and maybe we can work forward from there."

Henry placed his hand against the small of her back and guided her towards the door.

"You said that you want us to find out who did this to your brother. Well, we can't answer that unless you answer our questions."

"Hey." Henry snapped around. "That's way out of line. She's the victim here; you can't blame her for the fact that you don't have any leads. She's under no obligation to be here right now, and if you don't back off—"

"No, Henry, it's fine." Elizabeth grabbed the back of her chair, yanked it away from the desk, and then sat down. She gripped the armrests, her nails biting into the wood, and she lifted her chin to Agent Hayes. "You think you can make me remember? Fine." She motioned for him to take a seat. "Be my guest."

Agent Hayes's face paled and his throat clunked as he swallowed. Behind him the hand of the clock tremored as it juddered from second to second. Elizabeth arched her eyebrows at him—_Tick-tock_—and, slowly, he lowered himself onto the chair.

He cleared his throat and shuffled the papers on the table in front of him, anything to avoid Elizabeth's gaze. "You said that the last thing you remember is getting into the elevator. Can you tell me what you were doing before that? What you did that morning?"

"I was at the office."

"And what were you doing at the office?"

"Working."

"Anything more specific?"

"I was in meetings."

"Regarding?"

"Russia."

"That's rather broad…"

"Well, it's a rather broad country."

Agent Hayes's gaze flicked up and met Elizabeth's glare. He gave a terse sigh. "Madam Secretary…I understand your reluctance given how traumatic this must have been for you—"

"I'm not reluctant, I just can't disclose the details of classified meetings without running it through the proper channels. If you need more information, feel free to contact my chief of staff and arrange a meeting—" Her gaze dipped to the cell phone in the middle of the table for half a second before it returned to Hayes's eye. "—one that isn't recorded on your iPhone."

"Right…" Agent Hayes pinched the bridge of his nose and then set his glasses back in place. "Maybe we should move on…" He picked up his pen again and held it over his notepad. "What about before work?"

"I went for a run."

"What time?"

"Early."

"Six o'clock? Seven o'clock?"

"She was up before half past three," Henry said from where he stood behind Elizabeth's chair.

Hayes's gaze darted up to Henry. "If you could let your wife answer, Dr McCord. It's important that she tries to remember for herself, as it might help jog any memories from later in the day." He turned his gaze back to Elizabeth. "Where did you run?"

"Outside."

"More specifically?"

"DC."

Hayes dropped his pen to the desk and massaged his brow. "Madam Secretary…"

"This is ridiculous," Henry said. He squeezed Elizabeth's shoulders. "Babe, maybe we should just go back to the room."

"No, I'm good." Elizabeth continued to glare at Hayes. "Agent Hayes here said that if I answer his questions, he'll tell me who poisoned us and why Will's in a coma. So, Agent Hayes, do you have any more questions?"

Hayes looked to Henry, as if to question whether it was wise to continue, but regardless of Henry's response, he went ahead anyway. "You got up early, you went for a run, you had meetings at the office. Did you do anything else that morning?"

"I had sex with my husband."

Henry's grip on her shoulders tightened. "Elizabeth."

A flush of pink spread up Hayes's neck and into his cheeks.

"Oh, I'm sorry." Elizabeth leant in closer and rested her arms against the table. "Does that make you uncomfortable?"

Hayes shook his head. "Not at all." But pink turned to crimson.

"It's just that you're blushing."

"It's hot in here, that's all."

"Perhaps you'd like some water." Elizabeth tilted her head towards the water cooler in the corner. "I can't guarantee it's not poisoned…"

"No, I'm fine, thank you."

"Good." Elizabeth gave a curt nod. She studied Hayes for a moment, and then asked, "So, do you need the details?"

Hayes frowned and shook his head slightly. "Sorry?"

"The details. About the sex. Or have I answered all of your questions?"

Hayes's mouth hung open, though there were no words on his tongue. After an endless moment, he clamped his lips shut, and then replaced the cap on his pen and flipped the cover down on his notebook. "I think we can finish there."

"Great." Elizabeth flattened her palms against the desk and pushed herself up to standing.

Hayes rose too. "But, Madam Secretary, if you do remember anything relevant—"

She wrenched open the door. "I've already told you everything I know."

Elizabeth stepped out into the corridor. The door swung shut behind her, and as soon as it did, she sucked in a breath that rushed right to the bottom of her lungs. She leant back against the wall, and with her eyes closed, she rested her head to the plaster. The chill seeped through her cardigan and tee, whilst something inside of her tightened, like a spring coiling and storing up potential, though it was an altogether different spring to the one she had found that night at the top of the vertical slide that overlooked the buzz of the carnival.

"Do you want to tell me what that was about?"

Elizabeth opened her eyes and rolled her head to the side until she caught Henry's gaze. She studied him: the furrow at the middle of his brow, the slight clench in his jaw, a certain shadow veiling his eyes. The look was mainly one of concern, though perhaps it held a hint of irritation too. She let out a huff of breath and tugged her lips to one side. "Would you believe me if I told you I didn't know?"

His expression softened. He took a step closer and laid his hand against her arm, just above the elbow.

Elizabeth broke their gaze and shook her head to herself. "I guess he just pissed me off."

She pushed herself away from the wall, and as they walked down the corridor, she slipped her hand into his. She tugged at his fingers. "I'm sorry about the whole sex thing."

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you to stop using sex as a weapon." He bumped his arm against hers, jostling her but at the same time clinging to her as though holding her up.

A smile tweaked at the corner of her lips. "Did you see his face though?"

Henry chuckled, and her smile widened, and for a second it felt as though they were kids again, drunk on cheap booze, carnival thrills and life. They stopped outside the glass wall of Will's room, and just like the high of that night, the feeling faded, lost to the pain of the morning after.

"Do you want me to come in with you?"

"No." She shook her head, and she watched Will where he lay, exactly the same as she had left him. "But I could use another cup of chamomile."

"Sure." Henry kissed the top of her head. He stepped away, but then stopped and turned back. A pinch gripped his brow once more. "What Agent Hayes said… I don't want you to think it's your fault that you can't remember."

Elizabeth nodded. "I know." But the spring inside wound a turn tighter. She offered Henry the wisp of a smile, and then pressed the button on the wall and waited for the swoosh.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and took hold of Will's hand, careful to mind the cannula and its dressing. Rust-like blood stained the cloth fringe of the dressing, and its plastic edges curled up and away from Will's skin, as though even it knew that it had been there far too long. She rubbed her thumb back and forth over his knuckles, keeping time to the blips of the heart rate monitor. The words escaped her in less than a whisper. "I remember."

Outside, the phone at the nurses' station trilled and fractured the artificial stillness of the ICU. Elizabeth flinched and glanced over her shoulder. A nurse in one of the rooms on the opposite side of the ward left her patient and bustled over to the desk. She stretched onto tiptoes, leant over the high worktop and picked up the phone. With the handset wedged between her ear and shoulder, she jotted down a note onto a thick pad of paper, and then ripped off the top sheet.

Elizabeth watched on, and as she did, she continued to speak, her voice even lower now. "That kid, the one with the nose—Jamie Frenshaw. You and your friends tied him to that tree so tight that you couldn't undo the knots, so when the bell went at the end of recess, you just ran inside and left him there. He must have been shouting for at least half an hour before anyone realised, and then the teachers couldn't undo the knots either. I think the janitor had to break out the bolt cutters in end."

She shook her head to herself, turned back to Will, paused, and then frowned. "And didn't his parents make him get a nose job in seventh grade…? That's right. They said it was because he couldn't breathe properly at night, but everyone knew it was because they didn't want him to be known as 'the kid with the nose'. And I can see why. Remember when Stevie had that snaggletooth…? Thank God for orthodontists."

She lowered her gaze to Will's hand, his fingers stubbornly limp beneath her own. She squeezed them tight, as if somehow she could send him a spark of her own life. "Wake up, Will. Don't become known as 'the guy who got poisoned and spent the rest of his life in a coma'. I want my brother back. Even if you're a pain in the ass. Even if you're a crisis. Please, just wake up."

* * *

**Any thoughts?**


	16. Chapter Fourteen: a house on stilts

**Note:** Thank you for your reviews! I'll admit that I have a soft spot for the carnival memory, so I'm glad you enjoyed it too. This chapter presented more of a challenge for a number of reasons, and looking back now, I think I would write it differently if I had the chance. I hope you like it nonetheless. (I'm trying to convince myself it's an opportunity to learn, not an epic fail.)

* * *

**Chapter Fourteen**

**…****a house on stilts.**

**Elizabeth**

**9:11 PM**

"He should've woken up." Elizabeth swivelled around in her seat on the armchair next to Will's bed. Her knees were hugged to her chest and buried beneath the folds of her cardigan.

The door hissed shut. Henry lingered at the edge of the room. Against the dim backdrop of the corridor, his reflection hovered in the glass behind him. He watched over her. The pinch in the middle of his brow was becoming a permanent fixture. But wasn't that what wrinkles were? Every line a laugh, a worry, a love, a loss?

"He should've woken up by now." She returned to Will. "He should've woken up."

Footsteps padded and squeaked across the linoleum. Henry dragged the second armchair across the floor and set it in front of hers, at a slight angle, and then sank down onto the seat. He leant forward, his elbows rested against his thighs, his fingers interlocked in front of him. His gaze raked over her. It felt as though he were trying to figure out whether her statement required a response or not, and if it did, what response wouldn't provoke her. "You heard the doctor."

"Breathing: fine. Heart: fine. Bloods: fine." She checked each one off on the fingers of one hand. "They keep telling me that everything's fine. Except for the part where he won't freaking well wake up." She flung a gesture in Will's direction.

There was no pinch in his brow. Just as laid-back as ever.

She massaged her forehead, and let out a long breath. It didn't ease the pressure that bound the top of her chest though, nor the deep-rooted ache that had invaded the hollow where her heart ought to be, and the tension in her brow refused to budge. She must have been accumulating enough lines for the both of them.

Henry studied her. "We just need to give it time."

She shook her head, a bite to her voice. "He doesn't need time. He needs a solution."

She gripped the cool wood of the armrests and pushed herself up from the seat. Her head reeled from rising too quickly, and possibly from the lack of blood sugar, whilst the muscles in her legs cried out from being confined and neglected for so long. Her calves cramped, and with the world descending into a prickle of black spots adorned with white haloes, she stumbled.

Henry leapt up. One hand caught her arm, the other found the small of her back.

But she brushed him aside. "I'm fine."

She paced back and forth next to the bed, her muscles straining against each step, and she pinched her eyes shut and waited for the prickle to fade. The headache that had been her companion for the past five days continued to pound beneath, as thumping as it was relentless, and the sour twist at the pit of her stomach still churned. "There has to be something else they can test for, there has to be something more they can do."

Henry perched at the edge of his seat, poised, as though he might be called upon to catch her at any moment. The weight of his gaze pressed down on her. "They're doing everything they can."

"We had the same poison, the same symptoms, the same antidote—" She stopped in front of Henry and turned to face him, one hand on her hip whilst the other clutched the back of her neck. "—so how come I'm awake and he's not?"

Henry stood up and eased closer, bringing them toe to toe. He slipped his hands beneath her cardigan and held onto her waist, and when she averted her gaze, he dipped to catch it. "Will had a much higher dose of poison and he was fitting for far longer than you."

"I know that. People keep on telling me that. But it isn't helping." She tensed and shied away from his touch as though his fingertips sparked with static electricity. "And if only I had been the one to fall ill first, if only it had been the other way around, if only I hadn't given him my food…"

"Wait." He frowned at her. "What?"

A jolt shot up her spine and into the base of her skull. She pushed Henry's hands off her waist, and turned her back on him. She hugged her cardigan around her, tight, tighter than tight.

"Do you remember something…what happened at the restaurant?"

"No." Her voice came out strangled. "I don't." She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. "I just… What they said… Will's always wanting to swap meals, and if he had a higher dose, then it would make sense…"

The jolt faded like a flaming missile into the billows of fog. With it, a pressure released, a rush of relief. She let go of the fronts of her cardigan, sank down onto the armchair and took hold of Will's hand.

_Healing hands_, he had once boasted after one too many Christmas cognacs, _miracle workers in lands where everything except hope has been lost_. If only he were awake, he would know what to do, or at least he would pretend he knew what to do until he could improvise a solution.

She rubbed her thumb over his knuckles. "Why hasn't he woken up?"

Henry crouched in front of her. He placed a kiss to each knee and then rested his chin on her lap and looked up at her. "Let's just see what the doctors say after they've had the chance to discuss the case. Maybe one of their colleagues will be able to help."

She dared herself to meet his eye. "Do you think they will? Do you think they'll be able to wake him up?"

He hesitated. A shadow fell across the hazel of his eyes and sapped it of its warmth; he couldn't have concealed that look of pity if he tried. Then one corner of his lips flinched. "I'm praying for him. I know neither of you believe in that kind of thing…"

The ache in her chest deepened, his words like a boot that slowly pressed down upon her sternum until her ribs started to creak, but she mustered a small smile, no more than a twinge of the lips, and she cupped his cheek and swept her thumb over his stubble. He meant well, but prayer wasn't a solution either, and it wasn't the answer she had wanted.

He turned his head and grazed his lips against the inside of her wrist, right on the juncture with her palm, and even though tendrils of pain must have been weaving their way through his dodgy knee, he remained crouched before her. "It's getting late. Why don't we go home and get some rest, and we can come back in the morning."

Her thumb stilled. She frowned. _What was he talking about?_ "I'm not going home."

"What do you mean?"

Her hand recoiled from his cheek, as sharp as it would with a nip of frost. She folded her arms across her chest and leant back in the chair. "I'm not leaving him here, Henry."

Henry pinched his eyes shut and shook his head to himself. "Elizabeth… You're exhausted, you've not slept, you've barely eaten in days. You heard what Dr Owens said—you need to rest."

"I'm not leaving him here. What if he wakes up in the night, what if something happens, what if he…?" She swallowed, but the unspoken word lodged in her throat.

"If there's any change, anything whatsoever, the nurses will call."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek. "I'm. Not. Leaving. Him."

Henry eased to his feet. He ran one hand through his hair, and his gaze roamed across the room before it returned to hers. "So, what? You're just going to camp out here all night?"

"Yes."

He arched his eyebrows at her. "On the ICU?"

"Yes."

A low laugh escaped him, though it held no humour, just bitterness, like acid that gnawed down to the bone. "Now you're just being unreasonable."

"Unreasonable? Unreasonable?" She scoffed. "You want to know what's unreasonable? This whole freaking situation is unreasonable."

His jaw tightened. "And you can't make yourself sick trying to look after him. You need rest, you need sleep, you need food."

"So, if it were me in this bed? Lying here in a coma? Are you honestly telling me that come nine each evening, you'd clock out and head off back home and just forget all about me until morning came round?"

His mouth pinched. A gleam stung his eyes. Seconds passed. Then his gaze faltered and fell away from hers.

"Right. I didn't think so."

A silence drifted between them, measured by the _blip…blip…blip…_ of the heart rate monitor. It prickled like a frozen mist creeping through a mountain valley before dawn.

Henry sank down onto the armchair opposite, and then leant forward and rested a tentative hand against her knee; so tentative that he seemed ready to preempt her if she tried to push him away again. His gaze rested there too. "I know that this is difficult for you, and that you're angry and sad and lost and so many other things that make no sense right now. I am as well." He met her eye, his look pleading and so full of pity that it smarted. His voice softened. "But you can't stay here twenty-four hours a day. No one can. It's not good for you."

She scowled. "I'm. Not. Leaving. Him."

"Elizabeth—"

She drew her legs up onto the chair and hugged her knees to her chest, dashing aside his touch. With her head bowed so that her hair swept forward into her face, she picked at the edge of her thumbnail, and just when the silence infiltrated the air between them once more, she murmured, "I think you should go home."

His gaze bristled over the skin of her cheek. It goaded her. It made the hairs at the back of her neck stand on end and her muscles tighten.

She cleared her throat. A little louder this time: "I said, I think you should go home."

"Elizabeth…look at me."

But she refused to meet his eye.

He reached out as if to lay his hand on her foot. "Elizabeth, please—"

Her gaze shot up. Her voice did too. "Go."

He shrank back. With the hurt that flared in his eyes, a slap would have been kinder. He stared at her, as though not quite sure what had just happened.

She lowered her gaze again, and stewed in the surge of anger that raged through her—she stoked it lest the grip of guilt might seep through—and she returned to picking at the edge of her thumbnail.

He scrubbed his face in his hands. Paused. And then gave a curt nod. "Okay."

He leant heavily into the armrests, pushed himself up from the chair, and then strode away towards the glass door. His footsteps screeched against the linoleum, discordant with the _blips_ of the heart rate monitor. A moment later, there came a swoosh, a pause, a murmur of chatter that drifted into the room from the nurses' station across the hall, a judder as the door slid shut again, and then…

Silence.

_Blip…blip…blip…_

Elizabeth continued to pick at the edge of her thumbnail, and then raised her thumb to her lips and chewed on the tag of skin. _You'll get worms_, Aunt Joan's voice weaved circles through her mind. Her mother had tried everything to stop her from chewing her nails as a girl, from the nail-biter's equivalent of a swear jar to salt-tipped fingertips to that bitter-tasting nail varnish that was meant to act as a deterrent or a punishment or maybe both, but in the end, all it took was one visit to Aunt Joan's house and a brief explanation of how chewing one's nails could lead to ingestion of worm eggs and a resultant infestation with pinworms, and she never bit off a hangnail again. Or not consciously at least. Of course, the habit had resurfaced from time to time, first with her parents, then with Uncle Stephen, then with Aunt Joan herself, and now with Will—

Elizabeth stopped. She lowered her thumb from her lips and buried her hand in the end of her cardigan sleeve. No, not with Will.

She stooped down and picked up the half-drunk mug of chamomile tea that sat on the floor at the foot of her chair—its teabag floated amidst the golden-green film that had congealed at the surface—and then she eased herself up from the seat. The tea hadn't helped with the nausea, not really, but it was warm when everything else felt cold and it had kept Henry happy for a little while. He wanted to feel useful. She wanted to feel…

She ambled towards the glass door, pressed the green release button on the wall, waited for the swoosh, and then plodded along the corridor—past glass box after glass box, DS agent after DS agent—and towards the family room, half hoping, half dreading she would find Henry there.

She peered through the grid-lined window set into the door as she pushed the handle down and shouldered the door open. The emptiness in her chest yawned until it was wide enough and deep enough to fill that empty room. So, he really had gone.

She tipped the cold tea into the sink with a splash and tossed the sodden teabag into the silver-grey swing bin that stood as awkward as a high school freshman in the corner between the wall and the kitchen units. But the teabag bounced off the rim and landed with a splat on the floor. She groaned and bent down to pick it up—every muscle in her body strained and pulled against her as she did—and then she chucked it in amongst the rest of the trash.

Most of the time it felt like Henry knew her better than she knew herself, as though he had been read in on special intel that was way above her clearance level, but if he knew her even half as well as he claimed to, he would have known that, '_I think you should go home_' meant '_Why won't you support me?_' and that '_Go_' meant '_Stay…please, just stay_'.

She flipped the switch on the kettle and then rooted around in the cupboards above for the teabags. In the third cupboard she tried, she found a stack of plastic tubs, one of which had a scrap of paper with 'Chamomile' scrawled across it in magenta ink sellotaped to the side. She lifted the tub down and unclipped the top, and then plucked out one of the teabags and dropped it into the mug.

How many times had she dropped everything she was doing to be there for Henry when he needed to be there for his family? Every wedding and birth, illness and death. And she had never once done it begrudgingly, even though some members of his family had always been less than welcoming towards her, and she had never once asked for anything in return—had never needed to, given the state of her own family—but she had always assumed that when it came to Will, Henry would understand. But maybe he couldn't understand.

The kettle rumbled to a boil and then clicked off. She lifted it from the base and poured the steaming water into the mug. Whilst the tea brewed, she took a seat on the faded turquoise couch.

Henry had family, in all its dysfunctional glory. For every argument going on, a new alliance was formed; for every trouble he faced, someone challenged him and someone else cheered him on; for every triumph he earnt, someone congratulated him and someone else pushed him harder; for every loss they encountered, they had each other to fall apart with and they had each other to lean on. But what about when all those hopes and needs were pinned on one person? It was like building a house on stilts right at the edge of a canyon and knowing that one day, sooner or later, a strong wind would sweep in and it would fall.

She hooked the teabag out of the water, and then settled back on the couch until the cushions moulded around her. She clutched the mug to her chest, and her fingers relished in its warmth.

Meeting Henry had given her the chance to build a new house, though that itself felt like it was on the precipice at times. But in a way, the two houses had been built on opposite sides of the canyon, so that the winds that caused one to sway closer to the edge pushed the other one further from the drop. Most of the time Henry had been the steady one, whilst Will teetered towards the abyss, but when she'd really needed him, Will had been there for her too.

* * *

**1989**

"Henry left me."

Will's expression dropped. "What?"

The grungy flicker of light flooded in from the hallway behind him.

"Henry left me." Elizabeth stepped aside and let Will into her and Henry's apartment—or their old apartment, whatever she was supposed to call it now.

"Back up a minute… What do you mean he _left_ you?" Will tossed his kit bag down at the foot of the oak-effect console table, pushed the door shut, and toed off his sneakers.

She led him through to the kitchen, and then snatched up the roughly folded piece of A5 notepaper from the countertop and thrust it towards him.

He skimmed it, all three lines of it, and then glanced up at her. "When?"

"A few days ago." She shook her head. Days, weeks, years…they all felt the same.

"And you're sure Henry wrote this…? _Your_ Henry?" He tossed the note onto the counter, and then grabbed her coffee cup and took a swig. He spluttered and slammed the mug back down, his face twisted into a grimace. "How about some coffee with that Scotch?"

"Of course he wrote it." She dragged the mug towards her. Her fingers curled around the ceramic. "It's his handwriting. And I called his mom. Apparently he's back home."

"So…he's run home to mommy, and you're here, alone in his apartment, hitting the hard stuff, surrounded by all his things?" He gestured to the stacks of musty books that towered up from the coffee table in the lounge, the three-quarter size acoustic guitar propped against the cushion of the armchair in the corner, the running shorts and t-shirt spread across radiator beneath the window.

"Well, it's not like I have anywhere else to go."

The words hit them both.

Elizabeth took a swig of the 'coffee'—it burned across the roof of her mouth and pinched the tip of her tongue—and then she shoved the cup along the counter to Will. He took a swig, and then another, and then winced as he set the mug back down.

He met her eye. "Well, you know I would offer to kick his ass for you, but the guy's a Marine and I barely made the debate team." His gaze followed her movements as she swallowed down another mouthful of liquor. "Would it make you feel better if I got beaten up for you?"

"No."

"Good, because I've got a date on Friday and I'm not sure if I can pull off a black eye…"

She jabbed him with her elbow.

"Ow." He recoiled and rubbed his arm. "I'm trying my best to be supportive here."

"Well, it's not helping." She carried the mug to the couch, cradling it against her chest, and then curled up on the cushions. "And Henry wouldn't fight you anyway. He's a good guy. A really good guy. And I thought…I thought…" She shook her head to herself and hid her lips behind the rim of the mug. "But I guess none of that matters now."

Will sank down onto the cushion at the opposite end. He studied her, and then gave a flinch of a shrug. "I thought he was too." He watched her for a while. Perhaps he hoped that she might give him a hint as to what the right thing to say would be, though there were no right words, not for this; she just didn't want to be alone. "So…do you want to drown your sorrows and make the list?"

"Alcohol? Yes." She raised her mug. "The list…? I don't have anything to go on the list."

Another shrug. "Maybe it's just too soon."

But when would too soon stop being too soon? Getting over other boyfriends had been hard enough, but Henry…he wasn't just a boyfriend, he was—

She cringed, and pinched the bridge of her nose. "God, and I actually thought he was going to ask me to marry him."

Will raised his eyebrows at her. "Seriously?"

A flush of warmth rushed up her neck and into her cheeks. It was the alcohol; of course, it was the alcohol. "Well, he's been looking at me differently for weeks, like something had changed, and then he started acting all _weird_, and I just got this feeling, you know?"

She had been so sure that something was going on. And she would have said yes; of course, she would have said yes. Despite Will's jibes about her prospective married name, she wanted to be Elizabeth McCord.

Her heart sank. It throbbed out an endless wave of hollow—'_would have_'…

She lifted the mug to her lips again. "But I guess that wasn't what he was planning after all."

Will pivoted in his seat and cast his gaze across the room. "All his stuff's still here."

"Of course it is." She winced back a gulp of the whiskey cut with a shot of coffee. "What did you expect me to do? Throw it all out? Or ask one of the sororities to burn it all in some kind of fire cleansing ritual?" She wafted a hand towards the night-blackened window.

"As much fun as that sounds—and I like you much better when you're mildly inebriated, by the way—you're not listening to me. All his stuff's still here."

"So?"

"Well, what kind of person leaves without his stuff?" He leant forward and grabbed Henry's dog-eared copy of the bible from the edge of the coffee table—the one that Henry had highlighted and annotated with his neat yet laboured scrawl until it became more of an insight into himself than into any teachings about God—and he chucked it at Elizabeth. "This place's like a museum dedicated to Henry. Did he take anything at all?"

She scanned the living room as though it were a game of spot the difference in one of those old puzzle compendiums their parents had bought in the vague hope of keeping Will occupied over the summer. "No. I don't think so. But he was probably in a rush."

"Yet you say he's been acting strange for weeks?" His gaze fixed on her, adding emphasis to his point, whatever that point might have been, and then he shook his head. "Look, whatever he was planning, it doesn't sound like he was going to do a runner. I mean, how easy would it have been to shove at least some of his stuff in his car and offload it into someone else's dorm?"

"But if he wasn't planning on leaving me, then why leave me that crappy note?" She thrust her hand towards the kitchen counter. The contents of her mug sloshed against the sides. "You'd think that over two years together would have earnt me more than three crappy lines, and he could at least have had the decency to say them to my face."

"Maybe he panicked."

"Panicked? Panicked over what?"

Keys rattled in the front door, and there came a clunk as it opened, followed by the slam of it swinging shut. Footsteps padded along the hall.

A pause.

Then—"Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth and Will twisted around and peered over the back of the couch.

A couple of seconds later, Henry appeared in the doorway to the lounge. He glanced from Elizabeth to Will and then back to Elizabeth again. From his look of mild shock, apparently that wasn't the reception he had been expecting. "Can I…can I speak to you a moment?"

"That depends." Elizabeth clutched the mug tighter to conceal the slight tremor in her fingers. "Are you here for your stuff?"

"No." Henry shook his head. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. "I'm here for you."

She held his gaze. If he were any other boyfriend, she would have told him where to go. If he were any other boyfriend, she would have written the list by now. If he were any other boyfriend, she would have forced herself to move on.

But he wasn't any other boyfriend. He was Henry. And he'd come back. And he was standing in their living room. And with the deep bags purpling beneath his eyes, his forlorn expression, and his crumpled clothes he might _just_ have looked even worse than she felt.

Her fingers flexed around the mug. "For me?"

He nodded. "For you. Always for you."

"Right." Will pushed himself up from his seat. "Looks like I'm not needed here after all." He eased along the gap between the coffee table and the couch, but then paused for a moment and leant in towards Elizabeth. "Please try and remember that I'm staying in the spare room and the walls aren't soundproof. I still have nightmares after last time."

* * *

**Present Day**

Now, nearly thirty years on, it felt like the winds had changed and both houses swayed on the brink. One she was desperately trying to hold up, whilst the other… Who knew how much of a battering it could take before it would fall?

Elizabeth blinked. The room around her faded into focus, as though she were approaching it through a fog. The mug that she cradled in both hands and clutched to her chest had somehow turned cold, and the glow of fluorescent light from the hallway outside no longer shone through the window set into the door. Her gaze drifted up to the clock on the opposite wall. Half past ten. She frowned. _That couldn't be right…_

She pushed up the sleeve of her cardigan. The wool scratched over her bruises and tugged at the tender skin. A glance at her watch confirmed it—half past ten. Time had slipped. It felt like arriving at a destination after a long drive, yet having no clue what route she had taken or how she had managed to get there alive:_ Had she run a red light? Had she cut anyone off? How on earth had she managed to navigate that six-way intersection?_ But it was her fault for letting herself drift into the fog in the first place. She couldn't afford to do that, not now.

She emptied the still full mug into the sink, rinsed it out a couple of times and left it upside down on the draining board. Then she blotted her hands dry on the pink gingham tea towel that was stuffed into the gap of the handle on one of the drawers.

All the lights on the ward were dimmed, twilight more than dusk. She wrapped the folds of her cardigan tighter around her, as though the darkness carried with it a chill, though of course the air retained its monotonous warmth. She ambled along the corridor, and nodded to the DS agents as she passed. She attempted to offer them a smile, though it must have been weak at best. Did they think she was crazy for wanting to spend the night there? Or did they understand? Other visitors spent no more than an hour or so with their loved ones, and they certainly didn't camp out overnight in their rooms, but maybe they had at first, maybe there was a tipping point when staying caused more harm than good. Or maybe they didn't have as much to lose.

She halted outside Will's room. Her heart stopped and her arms fell loose at her sides. The fronts of her cardigan swayed open. _What the…?_

She swatted the button on the wall.

Swoosh.

She stumbled inside. "What's all this?"

Henry spun around, and the momentary surprise swept from his face, replaced with a warm smile. "There you are." He dropped the grey woollen blanket onto the cot bed that had been set up at the edge of the room. "I pulled some strings. Now you have somewhere to sleep." He tilted his head towards the bed. "And toiletries, clean clothes, books to read to Will." He motioned to the jute bags at the foot of the bed. "I brought you some food too—plain things, popcorn, crackers, bananas—in case you want something to eat. I thought they might help with the nausea. Now, we can take it in turns to—"

She strode over to him and flung her arms around his neck. She bunched the back of his tee in her fists as she clung to him, and tears scalded her eyes.

He froze and then wrapped his arms around her. "Hey." He stroked her hair, and when a sob hitched through her chest, he hushed her. "It's okay, it's okay, I'm here."

He held her close and swayed her back and forth, and with each to and fro, the tightness in her chest eased, until the gusts so strong that they had stolen the air from her lungs had calmed and at last she could breathe again.

"I thought you weren't coming back," she whispered.

"And leave you here on your own? You'll have to do way more than that to scare me off." He kissed the top of her head, and then drew back just enough to look down into her eyes. And his own eyes held the same sincerity that they had on the day he'd returned to their apartment, the day before he got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife. "No matter what, I'm here for you."

She cupped his jaw and brushed her thumb across his cheekbone. "Thank you."

His gaze flitted to her lips, and then back to her eyes—a silent, '_Can I?_'.

She managed a watery smile and gave a nod, and then closed her eyes as he leant in and met her with a chaste kiss.

When they parted, he ran his hands down to her waist, whilst she linked her fingers behind his neck. His thumbs rubbed against her lower ribs through the cushion of her cardigan. "And I'm sorry about what I said. I'm just worried about you."

She shook her head. "I'm okay."

He searched her eyes, and the pinch returned to his brow. Then he nodded, not as though he agreed, but as though he acknowledged that some fights weren't meant to be won. "Okay." He tilted his head towards the cot bed. "Why don't you get some sleep, and tomorrow we'll speak to the doctors again and maybe they'll have some good news."

She glanced at the cot bed, her lips parted. A prickle spread over her skin. A tingle of moisture in the air, the threat of an oncoming fog. "I…I don't know…I…" She toyed with the hair at the nape of his neck. "Why don't you get some sleep first, and I'll swap with you later."

His frown deepened. "Elizabeth—"

"No, really." She bunched her arms to her chest and eased a step backwards, so that his hands fell away from her waist, and then she padded across the room to the table in the corner, picked up her cell phone and disconnected it from the charger. "I'm not tired yet, and I wanted to look up ways to help Will. There must be something…"

"Elizabeth." He stepped up behind her, close enough for his body heat to radiate through her. He reached around and plucked the phone from her hand. "Bed."

When she didn't move, he tossed the phone down again so that it clattered and skittered across the wood. "Look, I'm trying my best to support you here, but if—"

She turned around and took his hand, and she looked down at their fingers where they tangled together. "Henry, I don't want to fight with you, especially not now." She glanced up and met his eye. "I need you on my side."

"I'm always on your side. And that's why I'm telling you that you need to sleep. Please."

She nodded. "Okay."

"Okay?" He raised his eyebrows. It looked as though he had been expecting more resistance than that.

She nodded again. "Okay."

She kicked off her sneakers, shrugged off her cardigan and hung it over the back of the armchair, and then pulled him towards the cot bed. She waited for him to settle on the thin mattress before she joined him, her back snug against his chest. He draped the blanket over them, the one taken from their couch at home, and then pressed a kiss to the tip of her shoulder.

"I love you," he whispered, and he rested his hand against her hip. His thumb dipped beneath the hem of her t-shirt and brushed against her skin. "And we'll get through this."

"Promise?" She stared out into the dull light of the room, towards Will, so deeply asleep in his own bed.

"I promise. Now, close your eyes."

She shut her eyes, and as he drew idle patterns over hip, she slipped further and further away from the ward, until, through the darkness she glimpsed the veil of sleep, and beyond the flutter of that blackened gauze lurked a field with grasses that churned in the night, the limbs of a black walnut tree that jutted out into the unknown, and a question that echoed through the fog in her mind—Would she fly or would she fall?

Her eyes shot open. She dug her nails into her palms and forced her breaths to shallow. She counted them, in and out, in and out, in and out, and she drove her nails deeper each time that the tug of sleep threatened to reel her in. She would draw blood before she succumbed.

When Henry's breaths evened out behind her and his hand against her hip stilled, she prised his fingers from her side, eased herself up and slipped free from the cot bed.

She picked up her cell phone from the table, and then grabbed her cardigan from the armchair and pulled it back on. Then she settled down into the seat, started up the search engine, and surrendered all thought of sleep to the icy glare of the screen. '_How to cure a coma: 17,700,000 results._' She tapped. Page one…

* * *

**More on Monday?**


	17. Chapter Fifteen: hearing the truth

**Note**: Thank you for your reviews—they make me happy! I'm never quite sure whether questions in reviews are asking for an answer or if they're the online equivalent of pondering out loud. I'm definitely not ignoring them—and I enjoy reading what you're thinking, so keep them coming. Answers will come throughout the story.

* * *

**Chapter Fifteen**

**…****hearing the truth.**

**Stevie**

**Wednesday, 31st October, 2018**

**1:27 PM**

"_Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord has cancelled yet more engagements today due to what State Department officials are terming an 'illness in the family'. Her spokesperson has refused to comment any further on the matter, and with no word from the White House, there is no indication as to when we can expect the secretary to resume her scheduled appearances. Here is Senator Carlos Morejon with his thoughts on what's happened over the last week_—"

Stevie knelt down and wrenched the plug from the socket in the wall. The television screen mounted in the corner above the coffee station zapped to black just as Morejon's smug face flashed up on the wall in the news studio. "What a creep."

"My sentiments exactly." Russell's voice rang out behind her.

Stevie startled and jumped to her feet. "Sorry, I…uh…"

"No need to apologise." He leant over the counter of the coffee station and grabbed a sachet of sugar from the tray near the back. He ripped off the top and tipped the crystals into the mug of coffee that Stevie had already poured, and then tossed the scraps of pink paper into the bin. "Believe me, there are far worse things I'd do to that guy than unplug him, given half the chance. Would have done them too if your mother didn't have such a hang up on ethics or morals or whatever."

She handed him the carton of half-and-half from the mini refrigerator. "Well, she did marry an ethics professor."

He shot her a look and shrugged. "Hey, I'm not judging."

She picked up her own coffee cup and scurried after him as he strode down the corridor towards his office. She teetered slightly in her heels, two quick steps to match each one of his own. "So, how come they're still saying it's just an illness?"

She flashed a taut smile at a group of staffers who glided past, as elegant as swans compared to her own crane-like steps, and then she lowered her voice. "And, I mean, no one's even mentioned the poisoning, or the fact that my mom was affected too."

"That's because your mother's staff are actually doing their jobs properly for once." He glanced back over his shoulder. "All it takes is a whiff of death and suddenly they fall into line."

"But why aren't we telling the public the truth?"

"The truth?" He turned again and arched an eyebrow at her.

She gave a quick nod.

He stopped outside the side door to his office. His chest puffed with a breath, and then deflated with his sigh. "Because the truth is a luxury that, right now, we don't have."

"What do you mean?"

He motioned for her to step closer as a group of men and women in suits, all wearing visitor passes, strode down the corridor towards them, the stomp of their footsteps muffled by the eggshell carpet. He waited until the group had passed before he continued. "We're trying to project the image of stability, and poisoned diplomats do not a stable image make."

"I see."

He laid his hand against the brass doorknob, and then shrugged. "Plus it doesn't hurt for your mother to keep a low profile, especially while whoever's responsible is still out there. And God knows we don't want to inspire a string of copycats."

Her grip on her coffee mug tightened, and her fingers slipped over the ceramic. "So, you think my mom's still at risk?"

He paused, his mouth open. Then he let go of the doorknob and scratched the back of his head. His gaze flitted to hers for a moment before it fell away again. "We've stepped up her security. Right now she has a small army protecting her."

The heat from the mug scorched through her fingers and palms, yet still her grip tightened. "But have there been any threats?"

"There weren't any threats with the first attempt."

"God, that's so not reassuring." She pivoted away from him, and shifted from foot to foot.

He tapped her elbow. "Look, we'll catch this person." He raised his eyebrows a fraction, and held her gaze. "Okay?"

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, and then gave a half-shrug. "Okay."

He rested his hand against the doorknob again, and then stopped. He tilted his head towards the office. "Why don't you come inside a moment."

She let out a shaky breath, and then shook her head. "No, I'm fine, really I'm fine." She pinched the bridge of her nose, and then forced a smile and backed away towards the outer office, one teetering step at a time. "I should probably…" She motioned to the doorway and the stack of files that waited on her desk beyond.

"It's not about that."

"Oh." She stopped. A vague warmth crept up her neck and into her cheeks. She stepped towards him again and winced. "Well, if it's about the work I did for the presentation, I know I've been a little distracted recently…"

"It's not about that either." He held the side door open for her.

"Then…?" She took another step.

"I just thought we could…you know…talk."

She frowned at him. "Talk?"

"Yes. Talk." He waved her into the office as though he were herding cattle. "Inside. Now."

She stepped into the doorway, but then stopped and turned to him. "It's just the last time you wanted to talk you told me that my mom had collapsed and was probably lying dead in a hospital morgue somewhere, and then you came back and said that she was alive but that she was in a coma and still might die and that my uncle had collapsed too and that he was probably lying dead in a hospital morgue somewhere, and now he's in a coma and still might die, so when you say 'talk'…"

"It's not one of those talks."

"Oh…okay then."

He nodded towards the office. "Shall we?"

"Sure." She stepped inside and then hovered near the door.

He strode past her, and motioned to the cerulean armchairs in front of his desk. "Take a seat." He clunked his mug of coffee down on the desk.

She clutched the arm of the chair and lowered herself into the seat. She watched, her lips pursed, as Russell gathered up the pieces of paper that were strewn across the desk, joggled the sheets together, fastened them with a black foldback paperclip, and then tossed them on top of the pile next to his in-tray.

"So…if it's not about the presentation, what is it about?"

Russell sank down into his own chair. He wheeled back and forth along the edge of the desk, collected up one file and then another, and sorted through them like a dealer purging trick cards from a deck. "I wanted to check how things are at home."

Stevie blew on her coffee, causing the surface to ruffle. "Fine, I guess." She took a sip, and the liquid burned against her palate. She lowered the mug to her lap.

He glanced at her over the rim of his glasses. "How are your brother and sister?"

She stared at the wooden pen pot that sat between the in-tray and the out-tray, with its pencils all sharpened to spearlike points, and then lifted her gaze to his and gave a mouth shrug. "They seem okay. I mean, Alison's super busy with coursework, so she's spending a lot of time in her room. And Jason says he's fine, though he's refusing to eat anything other than freezer food—"

Russell's eyebrows quirked. "Freezer food?"

Another wave of heat crawled though her cheeks. "Well, normally Dad would cook, but he's been so busy at the hospital with Mom and Uncle Will, and as I said, Alison's crazy busy with coursework and I've got a lot of my own stuff going on, so we've just been ordering takeout."

"So, why's he eating freezer food?"

She bunched her lips to one side. "I think he's afraid the takeout will be poisoned."

"I see."

She lowered her gaze again, and addressed the coffee mug as she ran her thumbs along the rim. "But some of the stuff in the freezer's been there since we moved in, and I'm pretty sure a lot of it's leftovers from meals Mom cooked that were too inedible to eat but we didn't want to offend her by throwing them out, so I honestly think takeout would be a safer bet, even if it was poisoned…and I'm not sure what he's going to do when he runs out."

"Right…" Russell leant forward and grabbed a pen from the pot, along with the stack of yellow Post-it notes from next to the computer keyboard. He jotted something down. "Well, we can always get someone to organise a grocery run—"

"Oh, no." Her eyes widened and she shook her head.

He paused, pen mid-word, and looked up at her.

"We're fine." She pulled a face, and made a motion as if to brush aside the concern. "Jason just needs to get over it. I mean, it's not like we're the targets."

Russell studied her for a second longer, then tore off the note, scrunched it into a ball and tossed it into the waste paper bin next to the shredder behind his desk. He swivelled back to face her. "But apart from that, you're all doing okay?"

"Sure. I mean, Mom will probably freak when she sees all the dirty dishes, but it's not like we've been throwing keggers or anything, so apart from that…" She hid behind a sip of coffee, and then pressed her tongue to her palate as it stung with the heat.

Russell took a swig from his own cup. His gaze held steady on her. He clunked the mug back down against the desk and barely concealed a grimace as he swallowed. "And how is your mother?"

The question hung over the room—a fraction too long, a fraction too light.

Stevie's skin prickled. She leant back in her seat and shifted atop the cushion; she crossed one leg over the other, and then switched them back the other way. "She's good. She's been discharged, and the doctor said she shouldn't have any long-term effects, though when I saw Dad the other evening, he did mention that her memory from that day's pretty much gone."

Russell snorted. "So I heard."

She furrowed her brow. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing." He waved aside the comment.

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Russell cut her off.

"Trust me, you don't want to know." He pivoted back and forth in his chair, his coffee mug rested to his chest. "But how does she seem to you?"

Stevie uncrossed her legs, and then sat up a little straighter and tucked one ankle behind the other. She searched the watercolour painting that hung on the wall behind Russell's desk, as though the answer lay in the pool of water or the mountains that disappeared into the fog. Her shoulders slumped. "Well… I haven't actually seen her."

Russell shot her a look that seemed to say—_Why not?_

She rolled her eyes as though they were a dial that could turn down the heat that smarted like sunburn on her cheeks. "I mean, I went to see her when she was first waking up, but I haven't seen her since, because she's still at the hospital, trying to look after Uncle Will, and I didn't want to get in the way, plus you're not meant to have many visitors on the ICU, and they're already bending the rules by letting her stay there pretty much the whole time, and—"

Russell held up one hand, and she stopped. "But is she looking after herself?"

She chewed on the inside of her lip. "I don't know."

He leant forward and scooted his chair up to the edge of the desk, and then set his coffee cup down with a clunk against the wood. He turned the telephone set around to face her, pushed it across the desk, and then lifted the receiver and held it out to her, earpiece first. "I want you to call your father and ask him how she's doing."

"Oh, um…" She placed her own mug down next to the telephone set and stared at the receiver for a moment. Then she looked up at him again and winced. "Why?"

He shrugged. "Because you're my intern and I asked you to." He cocked the receiver towards her. "Any problems?"

She smoothed her palms down her thighs; the rough wool of her suit skirt grated against them as she rid them of their film of sweat. "What I mean is…why can't _you_ call him?"

His shoulders lifted and then fell in a sigh. "I have, several times."

"And…?" Her breath froze.

He held his hand out wide. "And she's 'fine'."

The air rushed back in.

He shook his head to himself. "You'd have a better chance of getting the Chinese to deviate from the party line than getting him to say otherwise."

Stevie leant against the backrest and hugged her arms across her chest, her hands tucked beneath her elbows. "So, you think he's lying?"

"I think he's…" Russell's gaze skittered over the room behind her, from one side to the other and back again, and then came to a halt. "…misguided."

"_Misguided_?" Her brow tensed.

"Look, I just need you to call and ask how she's doing, nothing more." He tilted the receiver towards her again. His gaze clung to her, and if eyes were windows to the soul, his were fitted with a five per cent ceramic tint.

She leant further back into the chair, and her hands clutched the folds of her blazer where they hid beneath her elbows. "I don't know…" She tucked her chin in and she turned her head from side to side. "I mean, if he says she's fine…" She dared herself to meet Russell's gaze. "I just don't think he'll say anything different to me."

"Only one way to find out." Russell nodded towards the receiver still clasped in his outstretched hand, his gaze never leaving her.

She stared at the phone, and as she did, her skin prickled, as though the plastic were teeming with static electricity, calling the hairs on her arms to attention and just waiting for her touch so that it could discharge as a spark.

"One call, that's all I'm asking."

And it was just a call, right? She probably ought to call anyway, just to check in, she hadn't called since… Well, she hadn't called at all. She had meant to, but then she had work, and 'peer-supervising' Alison and Jason, and friends off-loading all of their problems on her whilst she couldn't off-load any of her own…

Russell nudged the phone towards her, and she took the receiver and held it in her lap.

…and then there were the quieter moments too, moments when perhaps she could have called, but somehow got distracted by Facebook posts, or Twitter, or Instagram, or painting her nails, or browsing for clothes that were way out of her price range and would forever be out of her price range so long as she was an intern, but that was okay because it meant that she was there for her parents, supporting them in their work.

She clenched the phone so hard that her nails dug into the grooves of the plastic. She glanced up at Russell. "I don't know if I can do this."

"Why not?"

She gave a shrug that jerked through her shoulders. "I don't know what to say."

"Just keep it casual. Ask if there's anything they need, ask whether your uncle is making any progress, and then ask how she's doing. Simple."

"I don't know…" She pinched the bridge of her nose and then let her hand fall to her lap. "I'll probably just mess it up. I get pretty anxious on the phone."

Russell's eyes widened, and he gave a slow nod. "Good to know, given that half of your job as my intern involves answering my phone." He wheeled his chair around to the side of the desk, and then stooped forward in his seat. His elbows came to rest atop his knees. "How about, the next time you need a few days off, they're yours, no questions asked?"

"Isn't that bribery?"

He turned his hands out, palms exposed. "This is politics, we call it an incentive." And then he clasped them together again, and something akin to a smile brightened his face. "So, how about it?"

Stevie tugged her lips to one side. She glanced at the keypad; her gaze skittered from digit to digit and typed out her father's number. One call, and what with all the engagement announcements recently, God only knew she'd be needing some time off. And her father would probably just say the same as he had said to Russell, that her mother was fine, so it's not like she'd be telling Russell anything new. But what if he didn't, what if he said—

She blinked and shook the trace from her mind. "I don't know. It seems a bit…unethical."

"And?"

"I was raised by an ethics professor."

"You were also raised by a spy." Russell's eyes bugged. He rocked back in his chair and ran one hand over his head, his gaze cast to the ceiling as he muttered something beneath his breath.

After a moment or two, he leant forward again and looked her hard in the eye. "Look, there's nothing unethical about it. You're just phoning your father and asking how things are going. What's wrong with that?"

She stared back at him, equally hard. "The part where you're asking me to betray my father's confidence."

His face contorted into a look of disbelief. "And you don't think your parents have ever deceived you in any way?"

She pursed her lips and shook her head. "Only if it was for a greater good."

"This is for a greater good." He jabbed one finger at the receiver that still rested in her lap.

She nodded. No doubt it was. "But whose greater good?"

He balked.

"If you expect me to do this—" She waved the receiver. "—you should at least have the decency to tell me why."

"Why what?" He leant back in his seat and raised his shoulders. Dumb was not a good look on him, almost as unnatural as his smile.

"Why you need me to call."

He smoothed down his tie—the fabric deep blue, one shade off indigo—and then shrugged again. "Because your father won't talk to me."

"So why should I?"

"Because…" A third shrug. "I need to know how she is."

Stevie's voice surged. "Why?"

Russell's gaze shot up to meet hers, and he clenched his jaw. Something in his expression hardened, a subtle change, sensed more than seen, like trying to pinpoint the precise moment when water turned to ice. "Because I need to know if she's struggling, and if she is, I need to deal with it, that's why."

And if poisoned diplomats didn't project stability, what about ones who couldn't cope? Losing Uncle Will would be devastating enough for her mother, but what if she lost her job too? Every time her mother was struggling, whether it be with grief, or worry, or whatever else, she threw herself into her work. It was her refuge. And if the worst happened, if Uncle Will died or just never woke up, she would need that sanctuary, because without it…without it…

Stevie shook her head. "I won't do it."

"Then it's no longer a request." Russell stood up and punched a number into the keypad.

But before the dial tone could ring out, Stevie slammed the receiver back into the cradle. "Then you'll have to fire me."

"You're willing to lose your job over a phone call?"

She shrugged. "You probably should have fired me at least twenty times by now anyway. At least this way I got fired for doing something right."

Russell gave a bitter laugh. "And you think that makes you noble?" He shook his head to himself. "Well, it doesn't, it just makes you stupid."

She jutted her chin out. "My mom left the CIA because she stood up for what's right."

His gaze raked over her. "If you believe that then you really are stupid."

"There you go then, two reasons to fire me. Stupidity and insubordination." She counted them off on finger and thumb, and then made a sweeping gesture with her hand. "So go ahead, I don't care. I'm not going to make the call."

"You're making a mistake."

"No, you made the mistake." She stood up and adjusted her jacket. She glared down at him. "If my dad says she's fine, then she's fine."

"If you honestly believe that, then you would make the call." He picked up the receiver again, and held it out to her.

She clutched her hands behind her back. "If we're done, I'm going to go clear my desk."

"Clear your desk all you like, but I'm not going to fire you."

She frowned. "Why not?"

"Because I won't give you the satisfaction of thinking you're some kind of martyr, standing up for your morals, when in reality you're just afraid."

Her frown deepened. "Afraid of what?"

"Of making the call. Of asking the question. Of hearing the truth."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard. She shook her head. "My mother is fine. That's the truth."

"Okay, then here's another truth for you, Stephanie McCord. We all lie. To our parents, our children, our colleagues, the nation, the media. We lie because we believe that in doing so we're serving a greater purpose, that we're protecting our country or the ones we love. But when we begin to believe those lies ourselves, we can end up doing more harm than good. Wait until you see your mother, and if she's fine then great, but if she's not…then you can decide whose good you're serving." He dismissed her with a wave towards the door. "I want those files by five."

She stalked out of the room and across the outer office—_Afraid? Who does he think he is telling me I'm afraid?_—and she slumped down into the chair behind her desk. She rooted through her handbag where it crumpled on the floor at her feet and pulled out her cell phone, and then resting back in her chair, she scrolled through the messages until she found the thread with her father. If he said her mother was fine, she was fine. He wasn't _misguided_, he didn't lie. She tapped the message onto the screen. '_Hey, pop…_'

She shook her head and hit the backspace, and then started again. '_Hey, how things are going?_'

Delete. Delete. Delete. '_How's mom doing?_'

Delete. Delete. Delete. '_Russell said…_'

Delete. Delete. Delete. '_I need to know, is mom…_'

Delete. Delete. Delete.

She stared down at the phone. The clock at the top ticked over—one minute, two minutes, three—the digits broken by the white strands of the crack that fractured across the top of the screen, not enough to obscure the display, but just enough to distort the image beneath. In her ears, her pulse thrummed, just as it had done when she was a child and she used to run across the landing to avoid the attic hatch and the monster that lurked above. '_The fear will never go away unless you face it,' _her mother had told her, and then she had pulled down the hatch, unfolded the ladder and coaxed Stevie up rung after rung, until finally she was at the top and she had seen. Nothing to be scared of, nothing at all. Just cardboard boxes, their lid flaps in tatters; plastic bags stuffed with the pastel shades of baby clothes; and the toddler-sized rocking horse that Jason had loved so much.

The screen dimmed, and then switched to black. Stevie stared at it for a moment longer, and then dropped the phone into her handbag. Because what if there had been a monster hiding up there after all? Then she would have regretted opening the hatch taking a peek. Maybe sometimes fear was more tolerable than the truth. Maybe sometimes it was better just to scurry on by beneath.


	18. Chapter Sixteen: suck it up

**Chapter Sixteen**

**…****suck it up.**

**Jay**

**Thursday, 1st November, 2018**

**3:31 PM**

"Right, so let's get started." Jay strode into the conference room, chucked his planner onto the desk with a thump, and then pulled up a seat at the head of the table. The smell of coffee staled the air, and the glare of the lights that bounced off the tabletop were perhaps the closest thing to sunshine he'd seen all week.

He opened up his planner using the frayed black ribbon that marked today's date, and then dragged both his finger and his gaze over the scrawl of notes. "My appointment with the secretary is in exactly—" He flicked his wrist and glanced at his watch. "—two hours and…fourteen minutes, and I'll only have a one hour window in which to get everything done, so we need to make sure that only the documents that urgently require her attention go with me to the hospital. Blake, if you can—"

"Blake's not here," Matt said.

Jay stopped, and his head snapped up. "What?" His gaze darted across the room, flitting from person to person in a Where's Waldo of the gathered staff.

When Blake failed to appear, he turned to Matt, who leant back in his chair and swivelled from side to side whilst he tapped his biro—capped-end up—against the pad of paper that rested on the desk in front of him.

"Well, where is he?"

The beat fell silent and Matt gave a half-shrug. "Last I saw of him he was crashed out on a sofa in the function room on the eighth floor."

Jay stared at Matt. "He's what?"

Matt opened his mouth, a quirk tugging at the corners his lips, but Jay held up one hand and shook his head. Now was so not the time for quips.

"I really don't have time for this." He massaged his brow and tried to ease away the tension that gripped him, but instead only succeeded in cranking it up a notch. His hand fell back to the desk. "Do you have any idea how hard it was to carve out one hour—one hour!—to meet with the secretary? Not to mention how difficult it was to arrange this with the ICU, because—turns out—hospitals aren't so keen on being used as a remote office for the State Department. And don't even get me started on having to run this by the secretary's husband. So if I miss this meeting because Blake, the person with the documents, fell asleep—"

"You know what?" Matt dropped his biro onto the desk and pushed himself up to standing. "How about I go get him for you?" He skirted around the head of the table, raised his eyebrows at Kat and Daisy, muttered—"Have fun with that."—and then strode away into the outer office.

"I heard that," Jay called after him.

Matt kept walking, and called back, "But, fortunately, I can no longer hear you."

"Great." Jay shoved his planner away, and it slid across the wood towards the tray of cinnamon swirls, bear claws and maple pecan plaits that sat in the middle of the table and pervaded the room with their cloying aroma. "So now I guess we wait, because it's not like I have a million-and-one other things that I need to do."

Daisy leant forward and cupped her hands around her coffee mug on the desk. "Look, I get that it's stressful, but you seriously need to chill out."

Jay gave a wry smile. "No. Stressful is running into my ex-mother-in-law while I'm trying to buy groceries and Chloe is halfway through a share bag of M&M's because it's the only way to stop her from throwing a tantrum in the middle of the store. This…this is…"

He pinched his eyes shut until he saw sparks of pink light. He blinked them away again, though some persisted like phantoms that floated at the edge of his vision. "When I agreed to be chief of staff, this is so not what I signed up for."

Kat lifted her coffee cup to her lips, but then paused and gave a mouth shrug. "I'm pretty sure the secretary didn't sign up to be poisoned either, but hey." She met Jay's eye, raised her cup to him, and took a sip.

Daisy's fingers flexed and fluttered against her own cup. "Maybe it's time to talk to the White House about having Deputy Secretary Cushing step in for a while."

Kat swivelled around and frowned at Daisy. "And let him rip apart the secretary's agenda?" She shook her head. "No, no way." She looked back to Jay and her eyes hardened. "You've just got to suck it up. The secretary will be back soon, right?"

Jay drummed his fingers against the desk. He stilled them and then shrugged. "Dalton said she can take as much time as she needs. Which is fine for him playing the magnanimous boss, but it doesn't exactly help when it means me running this shadow State Department."

"But she's not going to sit on the ICU forever. I mean, I'm praying for her brother to get better and everything, but even if he doesn't, she can't just keep staying there. There comes a certain point…" Kat pivoted from Jay to Daisy and back again. "Right?"

"Right." Jay leant forward and plucked one of the pastry plaits from the tray. He sat back and set it down on a paper napkin in front of him, and then glanced up at Kat as he began to shred it apart. "Let's just hope we're still afloat by the time she gets back."

He popped the end piece into his mouth, and then dusted the crumbs from his fingertips. The pastry was brittle and bland. He raised his fist to his lips as he swallowed it down. "Please tell me you at least have some good news about Russia and the BSR."

Kat pressed her lips into a taut line and shook her head. "No can do I'm afraid."

Jay winced. "How bad?" He stood up and retreated to the desk behind, with its carafes of coffee and stacks of mugs, and then poured himself a cup.

"Not irrecoverable…yet."

Jay shot her a weak smile over his shoulder. "Is it wrong that that might just be the most optimistic phrase I've heard all day?"

Kat chuckled.

Jay took a swig of the lukewarm liquid, grimaced as the bitterness hit the back of his tongue, and sank back into his seat. "So, what's happening?"

"Well." Kat's fingers splayed around the mug that she held atop the desk. "With the secretary keeping a low profile, I think they're holding out to see if there might be a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to the environmental clauses."

"Because they know that's her agenda."

"Exactly. She hasn't made an appearance in the last—" Kat counted off the days on her fingers, and then shook her hand out as she gave up. "—I don't know…week? And I guess they're looking to take advantage of that."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?"

Kat wrinkled her nose. "Because it's Russia."

Jay let out a low snort. "Of course." He stuffed another piece of pastry into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of coffee. The pastry ought to have cut through the bitterness of the coffee and the coffee ought to have remedied the dryness of the pastry, but it didn't have the desired effect. "I need you to keep pushing back. With everything going on, the last thing that the secretary needs—that the department needs—is for this deal to fall apart."

"I'll do my best, but I can't promise anything." Kat shook her head to herself, and lowered her voice. "They've been unhappy about those clauses since the beginning."

Daisy gave an incredulous look as she scrolled down the screen of her tablet. "Because protecting the environment is such a bad thing."

Kat shrugged. "Bad for profit."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Blake scurried between the desks of the outer office, two binders as thick as telephone directories clutched in his arms. Matt trailed a few paces behind.

Jay swivelled around to face the doorway. "Look who's decided to join us."

"I fell asleep."

Jay pushed away the rest of the pastry, the napkin covered in frittered flakes and crumbs. "Well, I'd appreciate it if you could sleep on your own time, rather than keeping the staff waiting. I've got enough to deal with without you wasting my time—"

The binders hit the desk with a thump, and pastry crumbs leapt into the air and scattered across the worktop. Jay looked up at Blake, whose jaw had tensed, nostrils had flared and lips had formed a tight pout.

Blake thrust a finger at the first binder. "That is a binder full of documents that everyone is insisting require the secretary's urgent attention, so urgent that they feel the need to chase me down corridors, stalk me in the break room, and—I'm not kidding—follow me into the restroom just so that they can explain why their document deserves the secretary's attention and can't possibly be dealt with by anyone else."

He thrust a finger at the second binder. "And this is a binder full of research and trials into treating coma patients, which the secretary herself requested at two o'clock yesterday morning, followed by calls throughout yesterday evening and the early hours of this morning to cross-check with articles she's already found."

He snatched Jay's coffee from the desk, downed it, and then beckoned for Kat's coffee and downed that as well. He slammed the mug back to the desk. "So, I feel I'm sufficiently harassed, sleep-deprived, and jargoned-out to tell you that you need to get over yourself."

Jay frowned. "What?"

"Ever since the secretary's been on leave, you've been whining about how much you have to do, and how hard it is on you, and how you're having to run the State Department all by yourself. Meanwhile, everyone else is just getting on and doing their jobs and taking up the slack without complaining about every little detail. So I repeat: Get over yourself." Blake slumped down into the seat next to Kat.

"Man—" Matt clapped Jay on the shoulder. "—you broke Blake."

Jay looked over the staff again, just as he had done when he first entered the room, but this time he saw. Kat with her crumpled jacket, and strategically placed pins that disguised the stains on her twice-worn shirt; Daisy with her make-up a touch heavier than usual, but that still didn't mask the dark circles beneath her eyes; Matt with the knot of his tie already loosened, though it was only mid-afternoon; Blake with his pocket square missing, his blazer unbuttoned and his hair uncoiffed. So it wasn't just him feeling the strain, he wasn't running the department alone after all.

He rubbed his brow. "I'm sorry if I've been…"

"Uptight?" Daisy said.

"Self-obsessed?" Matt said.

"Kinda whiny?" Kat said.

Blake shot him a look. "A pain in the ass."

Jay lowered his gaze to the desk and conceded their suggestions with a nod and a self-deprecating smile. "I was going to saying 'grumbling', but I guess all of those things too." He looked to them in turn. "Look, I know that this situation is difficult—for everyone—and I appreciate the work you're doing…even if it doesn't always seem like it."

"We're doing it for the secretary," Matt said. "What she's going through… If we can just make it a little bit easier for her, then all the late nights and added stress are worth it."

Jay nodded. Because what would the State Department be without Secretary McCord? He motioned to the binder full of documents. "So, shall we?"

He opened up the file and parted the binder rings with a click, and then shared out the documents amongst the staff. "I want us to go through each document and check how urgent it is and how essential it is for the secretary to read. Anything requiring her immediate attention or signature goes back into the file and goes to the hospital with me. Everything else should be handed off to the undersecretaries, or put aside until she returns. The idea is to minimise her workload, not just transport the office to her."

Kat frowned as she flicked through the reams of paper in the second binder, the one with all the research into comas that Blake had compiled. "Man, these are depressing."

"I know." Blake reached out to accept a stack of documents from Jay. "And they're only the promising ones."

Daisy held her hand out for her own pile. "I'm going to need to give the gaggle something soon too. It's all they ask about at every briefing." She looked around the others. "You know what I said when my alarm went off this morning?" She paused. "'No comment'."

A chuckle spread around the table.

Kat closed the coma file and began to sift through the first few documents. She glanced up at Jay. "Do the White House plan to release any information?"

Jay shook his head. "Not yet. With the investigation on-going, they're keen to keep details out of the news."

Daisy rolled her eyes. "Well, it's okay for them; they're not the ones having to deal with it. I'd like to see Russell Jackson stand up in front of the press pit every day and tell them there's nothing going on, that the secretary is fine, that reports of her motorcade seen rushing to the hospital were all just an illusion."

Jay shook his head to himself. "Well, let's just hope that the secretary's brother makes a swift recovery, so that she can come back to work and everything can return to normal, and as soon as she makes a few appearances, the media interest will die down."

Blake laid his hands on top of the binder stuffed full of coma studies. A smile that brimmed with so much false cheer that it made a Pan Am look positively heartfelt stretched across his lips. "So that's what all these scientists were missing. Hope. Along with prayers and lucky charms and unicorn dust."

Everyone stopped sorting and turned to Blake.

Blake's expression lingered, then withered, then fell, then contorted into a grimace. "God, I need sleep." He pushed the binder towards Jay. "Please will you pass this onto the secretary?"

Jay gave a nod, and his gaze lingered on Blake, a little uncertain. "Sure."

"And for the love of God, someone please take away her phone."

Matt grinned and glanced up over the top of one of the documents. "Why don't you just put yours on silent?"

Blake sighed. "I did, but turns out she has my landline."

Matt shrugged. "So unplug it."

"Turns out she has my neighbour's number too."

Matt winced. "Ouch."

Blake stared distantly across the conference room. "I'm thinking about emigrating." The wistful look faded and he shook his head to himself. "Who am I kidding?" He returned to the document in front of him. "She's ex-CIA. There's no escape."

* * *

**I feared it might be a risk writing a story that wasn't solely E/H centric, but I hope you're still enjoying the chapters from other characters' perspectives. (I promise there are elements of E/H throughout.) As always, thank you for your reviews!**


	19. Chapter Seventeen: the role of speech

**Chapter Seventeen**

**…****the role of speechwriter.**

**Matt**

**5:53 PM**

"Dude," Matt said as Jay clutched the binder to his chest and glared at his watch for the fifth time in the last three minutes. "Just be patient."

"The meeting was meant to start ten minutes ago and we haven't even made it onto the ward." Jay swatted the buzzer on the wall outside the ICU again.

The tone rang out, a low bleep like a heart rate monitor signalling cardiac failure, and then died off without answer.

"This is ridiculous." Jay tucked the file crammed with documents beneath his arm, fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

"What are you doing?"

"Calling Dr McCord." He pressed the phone to his ear, and turned his back on Matt.

Matt leant against the wall and hugged the binder full of coma research loosely to his chest. "Look, someone will open the door when they're free. It's an ICU. I'm sure they've got bigger concerns."

A cluster of nurses sailed past. All of them wore stiff Twitter-blue smocks that jerked robotically with each step, black elasticated clasp belts cinched around their waists, and uneasy frowns. They eyed Matt and Jay, their gazes sharp and lingering.

Matt offered them a broad smile and nodded to them. "Hey, there." _Keep moving, nothing to see here._

"If I don't get these documents signed and leave here soon, I'm not going to make it in time to put Chloe to bed, and it was hard enough getting Abby to agree even to that when I've already missed my nights this week." Jay lowered the phone and stared down at the screen. "He's not answering." He pointed to the buzzer next to Matt. "Press that again."

"No. Just give it a minute."

"I thought you'd be eager to get out of here too." Jay raised his phone to his ear again. He tilted the mouthpiece down, towards his shoulder. "Haven't you got the big date tonight?"

"So long as I leave by six-thirty, I'll be fine."

"Cutting it a bit close, isn't it?"

Matt raised his shoulders in a half-shrug. "Don't want to appear too eager."

Jay lowered his phone and shook his head as he frowned at the screen. "It's just going to voicemail." He stepped up to the window in the door, and with one hand cupped to shield his eyes, he peered through the glass. "I can see nurses in there just wandering around." He waved as though he were flagging down an emergency vehicle—"Hey"—and then leant over and hit the buzzer again.

The dull tone rang out and out and out, and then died off.

"Right, now they're just ignoring us on purpose."

"Probably because you keep pressing the buzzer."

"That's what it's there for."

Matt wedged the coma file beneath his arm and fished in his inside jacket pocket for his own cell phone. He dragged his thumb across the screen, drawing a web between the numbers of his passcode, and then—with the screen unlocked—he entered the browser.

"What are you doing?"

He navigated to the hospital website, double tapped on the ward contact number and selected 'Call'. He held the phone to his ear. "Opening the door."

The dial tone kicked in, and a moment later—"ICU. How can I help?"

"Oh, hi, I was wondering if someone could possibly open the door? We're currently stood outside the ward and—"

The door buzzed, a throaty drone, and the lock disengaged.

"Thank you." Matt hung up and slotted his phone back into his jacket pocket. He shot Jay a look over the rim of his glasses. "See."

"How come they answer that but not the button?" Jay flung a gesture towards the buzzer on the wall, his other hand still gripping the edge of the document file where it hung in a sling beneath his arm.

"Because they can ignore the button, but they can't ignore the phone." Matt hauled open the door, and the weight of it wrenched through his shoulder. He motioned for Jay to step onto the ward first. "Spend enough time in hospitals and you soon learn a few tricks."

The door clunked shut behind them. Though the air hung heavy and warm, like those soupy days at the height of July when the city air stopped and every breath felt empty and lifeless, a prickle ran over Matt's skin and escaped through his neck and shoulders in a shudder. They walked beneath the subterranean glow of the fluorescent panels, through the pall of smells that tingled in the nose, amidst the bleeps and beeps and whooshes and clicks that accompanied the echo of their footsteps along the hall. Each step bound Matt's chest a little tighter, and he patted the inhaler that weighed down his jacket pocket.

One of the DS agents that dotted the corridor, a member of the secretary's usual detail, nodded to Matt and Jay. "She's next to the nurses' station." He jerked his head towards the curved wooden desk, with its abutting cluster of teal chairs, that formed the heart of the ward.

Each room that they passed had a glass wall that fronted onto the corridor. It reminded Matt of the pet shops in Busan, the ones with the dogs in glass boxes in the windows, where the puppies scrabbled against the walls in a desperate fight for their freedom and scrapped with one another over their right to a home; only, the creatures here on the hospital ward fought a more silent battle, as they lay there at best minimally conscious, or at worst just motionless and alone.

"Man… This place is depressing."

"I can actually feel the life being sucked out of me." Jay made a claw-like motion, as though the fingers of a grabber had hooked onto his soul.

They stopped outside the box directly opposite the nurses' station. Matt placed the coma binder down on the chair behind him, and then stood with his arms folded across his chest as he and Jay stared through the glass into the room.

Dr Adams lay in the bed at the centre, his expression peaceful, blissfully unaware of his sister who paced back and forth in front of him, one hand clutched at her hip whilst the other raked through the roots of her hair. Dr McCord stood with his back to the glass. He massaged his brow, and when his wife strode past him again, he reached out and caught hold of her elbow. But she shook herself free and continued, back and forth, back and forth, and tugged her cardigan up from where it had slipped down over one shoulder.

"She looks…" Jay's gaze tracked the secretary, back and forth, back and forth, like he were following a game of ping-pong.

She hitched up the waistband of her joggers, and then dodged her husband when he grabbed for her again. And the pacing, and the loose clothes, and the translucence that clung to her skin were just a distraction from something that ran much deeper, something that struck with a bitter ache of recognition right at Matt's core.

"Vulnerable."

"I was going to say 'awful'." Jay lowered his gaze and shook his head to himself. With a pained expression, he pinched the bridge of his nose. "No wonder Russell Jackson has been pestering me to find out how she's doing."

"Hey." Matt pivoted to him and frowned. "She's been through a lot. You can't expect her to look all polished and media-ready the whole time."

Dr McCord held an arm out across her path, but she pushed him aside. He let his arm drop and then scratched the back of his head, and as his shoulders slumped with a deep exhalation, he turned towards the glass. His gaze flitted up to Matt and Jay, and he gave a double take. Then he stepped towards the door.

Jay held his hand aloft in greeting, and he spoke through a smile so taut it looked like it might shatter. "Still. We can't have her making any appearances looking like that."

Dr McCord pressed the green button on the wall and the door swished open.

"Hey, Doc." Matt offered him a warm smile and nodded towards the room. "How are they doing?"

Dr McCord rubbed his brow, and stared down at the floor for a moment before he met Jay's eye. "Look, I know we scheduled this, but now really isn't a great time." He glanced back over his shoulder, and his gaze lingered on his wife.

Jay took a step forward, one hand raised as though to stop that train of thought, or perhaps just flip the points and reroute it. "It won't take long, it's just—"

Dr McCord returned to Jay and shook his head. "She's exhausted. She needs to rest." And with the bags that slumbered beneath his hollow eyes, he could have been talking about himself too.

Jay arched his hand atop the binder. "It's just a few signatures, nothing taxing. I promise."

Dr McCord shook his head again. "I think it's best that we rearrange."

"I hear you, but these require the secretary's urgent attention, and if I don't—"

"Now isn't a good time." His eyes darkened, as though consumed in a swell of black cloud.

Matt tipped his chin towards the room. "What's with all the pacing?"

Dr McCord looked back to his wife, and his eyes softened again, the clouds dispersing in an instant. "She's processing." His lips tugged into a sorry smile. "Will had haemodialysis today and Elizabeth convinced herself it would wake him up. Apparently it's been effective in other cases, though not with this poison."

Jay forced a smile that was all too bright for such a sombre place. "Maybe a little bit of work would be good for her, help take her mind off things for a bit."

"Dude." Matt wrinkled his nose at Jay. "Her brother's in a coma. This isn't some boo-boo that you slap a plaster on and treat with a lollipop."

Jay leant in towards him. He raised the binder as though it were a soundproof shield, and lowered his voice. "I could use a little help here. If we don't get these signatures tonight—"

"She's stopped pacing."

"What?" Jay frowned, and then spun back to face the glass.

Inside, the secretary had come to a halt at the end of her brother's bed. She raised both fists and clutched them to her forehead. Her arms trembled from the tension.

Unease trickled out from the pit of Matt's stomach, like the moment you realise the knife in your hand has slipped, but the blood has yet to well and you're strung out on the lag between the receptors in your finger and the pain centres in your brain.

He shot a glance at Dr McCord. "Um…Doc…?"

But Dr McCord had already hit the button on the wall and slipped through the gap before the door had a chance to open fully. He dived in front of his wife, placing himself between her and the end of the bed, and he grabbed hold of her upper arms, his fingertips pitting into the thick wool of her cardigan, and he held her back as she screamed. "Wake up, wake up, wake up."

She tried to shrug him off, and then twisted from side to side to break his grip, but he wrapped his arms around her—a bearhug, a straitjacket of a hold—and bound her to his chest. She bunched her arms together and squeezed them between herself and her husband, trying to force a gap and wrestle herself free, but he linked his hands behind her, the hold never loosening, until a switch flipped and her movements slowed, and then ceased.

Her forehead fell against his shoulder, and her whole body shuddered. With one hand, her husband smoothed circles over her upper back; with the other, he stroked her hair; all the while, he rocked her, swayed her from side to side.

Jay stared on, wide eyed, mouth agape. He turned to Matt and shook his finger at the scene in front of them. "That's not processing… That's a total mental freakout." He emphasised his point with a jab towards the room.

"Hey." Matt scowled at him. "She's upset. Just cut her some slack, all right?"

"Uh uh, no way." Jay shook his head, and his tongue pushed in front of his teeth and pressed his lower lip out. "That…" He wagged a finger at the couple again. "That's way past upset." He dipped his hand into his jacket pocket, retrieved his cell phone, and took a step away.

"You'd better not be calling Russell Jackson."

"Russell Jackson?" Jay glanced back and furrowed his brow at Matt. "No way. I'm letting Abby know that I'm not going to make it." He let out a terse sigh, and added in a mutter, "This is going to take all night."

Matt scoffed. He gave a bitter chuckle and shook his head to himself—_So that was his main concern?_—and then he looked up at Jay. "Look, if you don't want to be here, you should just go."

"Go?" Jay swivelled back to face him, the phone pressed to his ear. "I can't just go. I've got a binder full of documents that all need her signature." He lifted said file from where it rested, balanced in one hand, against his side.

"So you keep saying."

"What's that supposed to mean?" He lowered the phone, tapped the call button again, and raised it to his ear once more.

"Doesn't matter." Some things couldn't be taught; only through experience could a person come to understand. "Look, there's no need for both of us to be here. I can handle this, you go see Chloe."

"But what about your date?"

"I've got time."

"That—" His gaze darted to the glass wall and the secretary beyond. "—is not going to be a five minute job."

"And that's fine."

Jay frowned at the screen of his phone. "She's not picking up anyway."

"Trust me, I've got this." Matt held his hand out for the folder. When Jay didn't pass it over, he flapped his fingers towards his palm—_Gimmee_.

"I don't know." Jay rubbed at his jaw.

"I think I'm qualified to hand the secretary pieces of paper to sign. Now, do you want to see your daughter or not?"

"Fine." Jay handed over the file. "But if there are any problems, just call." He backed away several paces, and then turned towards the exit. But then he stopped and spun back. His brow furrowed and he spoke in a hushed tone. "Do you think I should be calling Russell Jackson?"

"No." Matt pulled a face, as though the suggestion were ridiculous. "Just give her a little space."

Jay raised his eyebrows. "To _process_?" He said it as though it were a euphemism.

Matt's expression sobered. "To process." Nothing euphemistic about it.

Jay conceded the point with a nod, though a half-hearted one at best. "And what about when Russell asks for an update?"

Matt shrugged. "You tell him that there was a clash of commitments, so you sent me instead." He waved Jay away towards the exit. "Now go, or else you never get to grumble about your workload or not having enough time with Chloe ever again."

Jay cracked a smile. "But then I wouldn't have anything to talk about, right?" He held up one hand in a wave as he strode away down the corridor.

Matt sank down onto one of the teal chairs that backed onto the nurses' station and rested the document file in his lap. On the other side of the glass, Dr McCord still held his wife in his arms, and as she leant her forehead against his shoulder, he stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, his lips so close that they brushed the helix. She had lowered her arms so that they were no longer wedged between her and her husband, but now draped loosely at his waist, the folds of his plaid shirt bunched in her fingers.

Maybe she wasn't okay, maybe she was more than upset, but what she needed was people who were willing to be patient with her, who were willing to take the time to listen to her and to understand, not people who just wanted her signature so that they could dash off to places they'd rather be, or who'd gripe about her pain as though it were an inconvenience because it didn't fit in with their agenda. Some things couldn't be rushed, and healing was one of them, no matter if the wound were a paper cut or if it slashed right to the bone.

Dr McCord guided his wife into the armchair at the side of the bed, and then squeezed her upper arm as he leant over her and pressed a kiss to her crown. His eyes slipped shut and he lingered there for a moment. When he drew back, it didn't take a lip-reader to know the words that fell from his lips—_I love you_. They were there, spelt out in every action, as essential as the blips of the heart rate monitors that echoed from every room.

He pressed the button for the door release, and then stepped out into the hall.

Matt stared up at him. "How is she?"

Dr McCord slumped down into the seat next to Matt and dug his fingers into the grooves of his brow. "She's calmed down." He shot Matt a quick look, a flash of panic. "She's just tired." And his eyes said, _It's nothing more_.

Matt nodded. "I know." He gave him a soft smile. "You're good with her."

Dr McCord let out a breath, somewhere between a huff and a snort. "It's not the first time she's launched herself at her brother. Normally he's said something to provoke her though…" He glanced to Matt and the trace of a smile, as faint as a childhood memory, played upon his lips. "I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss their bickering."

Matt chuckled. He picked up the binder from the seat on his other side and held it out to Dr McCord. "Blake put this together for her. Research into comas and poisoning. I think he weeded out the less optimistic ones. I don't know if it'll be much help…"

Dr McCord took the binder. "Thank you."

"And I'm sorry about Jay. He's feeling the pressure at the moment, and that can make him a little inflexible. If you want me to come back later—"

Dr McCord shook his head. "No, she said she'll do it now. And Jay was right, she could use a break." His eyebrows raised a touch, and he added, more to himself than anyone else, "And it's not like she's going to rest anyway."

Matt studied his expression, from the circles that sagged beneath his eyes to the lines that ran a little deeper now. "How are you holding up?"

Dr McCord stared distantly towards the room— No, _through_ the room, perhaps to a different time. His lips pulled taut. "We've been through worse."

"Me too." The words hung in the air, as heavy as the cloak of disinfectant that didn't mask but perhaps only provided sharper contrast to the smells that lurked beneath. "If you need a break at all, there's not much demand for a speechwriter at the moment…"

"Thanks, Matt, but we're okay. Really."

The door opened with a swoosh, and the secretary stepped out into the corridor. Pink rimmed her eyes, red spidered their whites, and her hands were buried in the ends of her sleeves. She folded her arms across her chest, and drew her cardigan tighter around her. "Hey, Matt." She offered him a breathless smile.

"Good evening, ma'am." He rose from the seat and tucked the folder thick with documents beneath his arm.

She winced, and then tilted her head towards the room. "So…about that…"

Matt held up one hand and shook his head. His nose wrinkled. "You're just processing. Trust me, I've seen far worse."

She studied his expression as though trying to figure out whether he was lying.

He added, "You should see the way my sister shouts at me sometimes."

She gave a slow nod. "Thank you." Then she motioned down the corridor, towards the entrance. "I thought we could go to the family room and go through the paperwork there."

"Sure. After you." And as she began to walk, he followed her, just half a pace behind.

"Elizabeth," Dr McCord called after her, and they both stopped and turned back. "Wait a minute." He ducked into the room and grabbed something from one of the plastic carrier bags that covered the table at the end of the cot bed. When he returned, he held it out to her—a brown paper carton, a cafeteria-grade cheese sandwich. "Here, take this."

"Henry…" She pinched her temples and shook her head. "I'm not hungry yet—"

"Just take it." The sharpness in his tone said this was a conversation they'd had before.

She stared at him, and something in her eyes hardened, like dew turning to frost, a look harsh enough to make brutal dictators quiver.

But her husband didn't so much as blink. "You need to eat."

The seconds between them thinned; time a thread that threatened to snap.

When he didn't back down, she thrust out her hand and beckoned for him to pass the sandwich, and as he placed it in her palm, she muttered, "He'd better be awake when I get back."

The secretary led the way to the family room, simmering in her silence, and then barged the door open with her shoulder and let the aching light flood out. She tossed the sandwich onto the table in the middle of the room—it skidded across the surface—and then she sank down onto the cushions of the faded turquoise couch that backed onto the far wall. She shot a look up at Matt. "Why is it that women spend their whole lives been told that they need to eat less and lose weight, but then when you get ill and happen to lose a couple of pounds—through no fault of your own—everyone thinks it's a sure sign that you're falling apart?"

Matt sat down next to her. He held her gaze as he fumbled for a pen in his inside jacket pocket. "He's just worried about you."

"Well, I'm not the one in a coma." She snatched the pen from him.

"No—" He opened up the binder and turned to the first document. "—but you were."

"What?" She scowled at him.

He shrugged. "You were in a coma. I mean, you pulled through, but for a while there you were, and none of us knew if you'd wake up, or if you'd even survive, Dr McCord included."

She shook her head so that the ends of her hair flicked around the angle of her jaw, and she pulled the file into her lap. "But I did wake up."

"You did. But that's only the first step. Now you need to recover."

She fished her reading glasses out from her cardigan pocket and slipped them on, and as the tip of her middle finger guided the frame up the bridge of her nose, the pink gold of the oval ring on her fourth finger glimmered, whilst the diamond at its centre fractured the glare of the fluorescent lights. Anyone else in the room would have seen it, that token of her husband's love; it was only she, with the ring facing away from her and her finger so accustomed to its weight, who was oblivious to its beauty, both at the surface and hidden in it depths.

Maybe the role of speechwriter wasn't so redundant after all…

Whilst she dragged her gaze over the first page, Matt began. "There are times in life when words just don't cut it, times when they offer no salve for pain or fear or grief. We're left speechless when we see our loved ones hurting, and so we resort to small acts that can fulfil their basic needs."

She licked the pad of her index finger and turned over the sheet, the curl of paper on paper crisp in the air. She released the nib of the pen with a click and signed on the line, and then moved on to the next document, her gaze never leaving the file.

"We bring them warmth through a hug, we bring them shelter through a safe place to sleep, we bring them nourishment through food—lots of food. And through these acts we're saying what words can't: I love you, I'm here for you, I see your pain."

She thumbed through the document, stopped, went back to reread a section, and then returned to the last page and scrawled her signature beneath the text.

"And sometimes we hurt so much that only by rejecting these gifts can we express our pain, can we externalise the turmoil that tears us apart inside. But by pushing people away and failing to meet our basic needs, we enable that suffering to thrive."

She leant in closer as she studied the third document. A pinch gripped the middle of her brow.

"So, a sandwich is not just a sandwich, it's a metaphor, and it's saying—"

"Matt." Her gaze remained fixed on the page.

"Yes, ma'am?" He leant towards the file, and tried to get a look at the document to see what the problem was.

"Will you shut up and just pass me the goddamn sandwich?"

Matt's mouth hung open. But then he caught the quirk of her lips and the barest glimmer of a smile, and he chuckled. "Of course, ma'am."

He pushed himself up to his feet and grabbed the sandwich from the table, and then he sat back down beside her, opened the carton and held it out to her.

She tore off a quarter and as she proceeded to read and sign the documents—one after another after another—she chewed her way through, nibble by nibble, and then the second quarter, and the third, and the fourth, and as she worked and ate, ate and worked, the darkness in her expression lightened, and the tension in her body eased, and by the time she popped the last piece into her mouth and brushed the crumbs from her fingertips onto the floor, that person in the glass box had gone, and for the time being at least, she was herself again, Secretary McCord.

She swallowed the last bite. "So, what's been happening at the office?"

Matt gave a mouth shrug. "Not much."

She shot him a sideways glance—one that said she very much doubted that—and then she returned to the document, about midway through the file.

"I mean, Jay's grumbling again, but he's getting the work done. The media are harassing Daisy, but you know she loves it really. Blake shouted at someone today—"

She stopped, the pen mid-signature. "Blake shouted at someone?"

"At Jay."

"Why?" She finished signing, and then clicked away the nib of the pen and put it down.

He sought an answer from across the room, one that wouldn't seem too accusatory. _Apply a little diplomacy_. "I think he's a little tired."

"Oh."

He twisted around to look at her. Bruised smudges hung beneath her eyes. "How are you sleeping?"

She pulled off her reading glasses and rested her head against the back of the couch. "I'm guessing Blake's already told you the answer to that."

"He did mention some phone calls."

"Tattletale." Her eyes were shut as she spoke.

"If you want to take a break, we can finish these off later."

She blinked her eyes wide open. "No. I'm fine." But she made no move to raise her head from the back of the couch. She pinched the bridge of her nose, and then as her hand fell back to her side, her eyelids fell shut again.

"Ma'am…you look tired."

She gave a soft snort. "I'm always tired. It's part of the job description."

"You look more tired. Why don't you have a lie down?"

She flapped her hand at the folder. "Because there's all this to do, and I need to get back to Will, and…"

The sentence lingered unfinished in the air.

"Then how about I read the documents to you, and then all you have to do is sign."

She cracked open one eye and peered at him. "Okay, now you're just trying to make me fall asleep."

He motioned to the end of the sofa. "Just lie down, and I promise that if you fall asleep I'll wake you."

"Why should I believe you?"

"Have I ever lied to you before?"

She arched an eyebrow at him. "Do you really want to get into that?" When he didn't reply, she straightened up and shot him an incredulous look. "Spying on me for Russell Jackson—"

"Okay, okay, let's not drag up the past." _Walked straight into that one_. He met her eye over the rim of his glasses. "Look, I'll level with you. I have a really hot date that I'm going to miss if I don't leave in exactly—" He glanced at the clock on the wall above the door. "—fifteen minutes, so spending all night on an ICU really wasn't my plan." He lifted the file from her lap. "It'll be quicker if I read it to you anyway. I've read most of them, like, three times already, so I can skip over all the unnecessary stuff, and then you can sign them all in one go at the end."

She studied him for a moment longer, and the wisp of a glimmer lit her eyes. "Hot date, huh?"

"Wake-your-boss-even-if-she's-insanely-tired-and-really-needs-her-sleep hot."

"Wow." The word escaped her in a low breath. Then she smiled at him. "So, Ronnie's back from Korea?"

He laughed. "Yes, ma'am. Just for the week." He passed her the cushion from behind him.

She took it and rested it against the arm of the couch. "That's the best part of long distance relationships—the part where they come back." She reached her hand out to him and patted his forearm. "Hey, you need to tell her to bring some hodu-gwaja back with her." She lay down, settled her head against the cushion so that her hair mussed against the fabric, and closed her eyes. She folded her hands on top of her stomach, her fingers interlaced and shielding the concavity beneath. "Henry used to bring me back letters."

"Letters?"

Her eyes fluttered open again, and she stared up at the ceiling. "I mean, he used to send me letters when he was away, but then he used to bring these letters back with him too. More like journal entries really, letting me know what he was thinking and feeling each day."

"Sounds romantic."

She smiled, as though she were remembering them, or perhaps just remembering a better time. "Some were romantic, some were funny, some were sad—" Her gaze sharpened on him for a second, her eyes alight with a wicked glint. "Some were enough to make a sailor blush."

Matt chuckled, and she returned to staring at the ceiling.

"They kept us connected. They made me feel like I had all these pieces of him with me even when he was away."

"Did you write letters like that back?"

She wrinkled her nose. "God no. I've always been useless when it comes to that kind of thing." It looked as though she were pondering the point, but then she shook her head to herself and the strands of her hair fanned out even further across the cushion. "I guess nowadays you have no need for all that, not with Skype and Facebook and God knows what else." She looked to him again. "You should definitely ask her to bring back the hodu-gwaja though."

"Will do, ma'am."

"Right." She flapped a hand towards the file. "Let's get started. Can't have you being late."

"Of course, ma'am."

He began reading the next document in the file, keeping his voice low and smooth just as he did when reading bedtime stories to his niece, and by halfway down the first page, the secretary's eyes were shut, and by the time he had reached the end of the second page, she was fast asleep. He placed the file down on the floor, careful not to make a sound, and then removed his phone and inhaler from his pocket, shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it over her.

He switched his phone to silent and typed out the message. '_Sorry, change of plans_.'

Then he settled back against the couch and toyed with his inhaler; he twirled it around his fingers and spun it on his palm, whilst the clock on the wall above the door counted down the seconds to what ought to have been his date with Ronnie, but when the moment arrived—heralded by the secretary's soft sigh as she surrendered herself to the depths of unbidden sleep—the sting of disappointment didn't hit him, with its venom of 'should have beens', instead what flowed through him was the simple contentment that can be found in each breath when you or someone you care for has ever struggled to breathe.

When Dr McCord appeared beyond the glass panel of the door half an hour later, Matt raised a finger to his lips and signalled for him to stay quiet, and then he eased up from the couch, glanced back to check he hadn't disturbed the secretary, and tiptoed towards the door. He prised the door open, snuck through the gap, and guided it back into the frame.

Dr McCord frowned at him. "Is she okay?"

Matt nodded. "She's fine. She ate the sandwich, and now she's fast asleep."

"How…?" Dr McCord looked at him as though he had just conjured a car out of thin air.

"You should stay with her, or go home and get some rest if you like. I can sit with Dr Adams." Matt shrugged. "Who knows, if reading to one of them got them to fall asleep, maybe reading to the other will get them to wake up."

Dr McCord's throat bobbed as he swallowed, and a sheen glistened in his eyes. He clasped Matt's shoulder. "Thank you, Matt."

"No problem, Doc." Matt flashed him a smile, and then stepped past him and walked away.

Dr McCord called after him. "Are you sure you don't have anywhere you need to be?"

Matt turned around, and walking backwards, he shook his head. "Right here's just fine."

* * *

**Thank you for your reviews! I like Funny Matt, but I also like his caring side. I hope you do too. **


	20. Chapter Eighteen: …the peculiarity of th

**Chapter Eighteen**

**…****the peculiarity of the tides.**

**Elizabeth**

**9:07 PM**

_The stars glared down upon the field. Beneath their cold light, the sea of grass turned grey-blue. The plumes swelled and broke around Elizabeth's legs as she ran; the stalks tickled and scratched and whipped at the skin of her calves, whilst jagged shards of stone impaled her bare soles. Ahead, the black walnut tree loomed. Its branches crackled across the night sky, a fractal web that reached out towards her and stretched over the blackened abyss beyond._

_Her heart lurched, and she was thrust to the cusp. Her heels jutted over nothingness, her toes curled into the dusty soil, her fingertips scrabbled at the rugged grooves of bark._

_'__Take my hand._'

Elizabeth jolted upright, and the suit jacket that had been tucked around her slid down, over the side of the couch, and pooled on the floor. The lights in the family room were dimmed, but the whole room strobed with flashes of the dream, each beat synchronised with the slam of her heart against her ribs. Her fingers trembled as she raked them through her hair, the roots damp with sweat, and her chest heaved over every breath.

_Not now. Please not now._

She swung her legs over the edge of the cushion, careful not to knock Henry where he dozed at the opposite end of the couch—his shoulders hunched, his arms folded, his head bowed—and she stooped down until her ears bumped against the insides of her knees.

_Breathe, Lizzie, just breathe_. _In, two, three. Out, two, three_. _Nothing simpler than that._

But each breath held the subtle sting of charred bread that drifted up from the toaster on the countertop at the edge of the room. Pink and white sparks pinpricked her vision, and she squeezed her eyes shut whilst the pressure in her chest grew and grew, as though she were funnelling air into lungs a quarter of the size of what they used to be. And as the sparks bloomed and threatened to unfold, she grasped for something, anything else to take their place, anything to cling to. Until—

* * *

**2002**

"You're doing this to spite me." Elizabeth's voice soared above the shadows of the lounge, and at the muffled cry from one of the kids' bedrooms followed by footsteps creaking across the landing, she clambered up from the couch and pushed the door to.

Will twisted around in his seat. "How is my wanting to help people spiting you?"

"You can help people at a hospital, Will. You don't have to offer yourself up as chum to warlords and terrorists."

"Says the woman who, despite claiming to have a desk job, disappears every few weeks and goes jetting off God knows where." He stood up and turned to face her, and then swigged from his bottle of beer and gave a shrug. "At least you'll know which country to repatriate my body from."

"Making cracks about you dying isn't exactly going to sell me on the idea."

"Then it's a good thing I'm not looking for your permission." He clunked the bottle down onto the coffee table, and grabbed his bomber jacket from the back of the couch. "I've already made my decision, Lizzie. I just thought you should know."

And as he strode towards the door, Elizabeth felt as though the world around her were disintegrating, as though everything she had built over the last nineteen years had not been from stone as she thought, but from sand that crumbled and slipped and whipped into the air, as stinging as the deserts of Iraq.

"What would Mom and Dad say?"

Will halted, one hand rested against the door handle. With his back to her, he turned his head, slowly, not quite enough to meet her eye. "Mom and Dad are dead, Lizzie. We survived without them, you'll find a way to survive without me too."

"How can you even say that?" The words escaped her in a rush of breath. She sank down against the back of the couch, winded, and her fingertips curled over the edge and pitted into the cushions. "You're my brother, Will."

"Exactly." He spun around. His gaze bored into her. "Your brother. Not your son, not your pet, and certainly not your penance." He wrestled his jacket on and flipped up the collar. "I'm going, Lizzie. Accept it, don't accept it, I don't care. Just don't make it my problem."

He turned and wrenched open the door, and as he walked away, his footsteps thudding off the floorboards, the cold glow from the lamp in the corner chased after him; it spilled into the hall and left the living room all that much dimmer than just moments before.

Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue did nothing except to taste that bitter silence, and before she could formulate any kind of reply, before she could even process what was happening, the front door slammed shut and juddered against its frame, and the glass of the neighbouring window pane tinkled as though it might crack. Or perhaps just shiver back into the sand from which it had come.

One second, two seconds, three—

A wail shook down the stairs. Jason, of course. Though how long would it be until the other two awoke as well? Screaming for their mommy, no doubt. But how was she meant to give them that when it felt as though she'd just lost part of herself?

She pushed herself away from the edge of the couch, but rather than stepping out into the hall and traipsing up the stairs as she ought to, she skirted around the end, slumped down onto the cushions, and snatched up the half-drunk bottle of beer. The glass sweated against her palm and the cool liquid burned a path down the back of her throat. She waited for the alcohol to hit her veins, for that mellow buzz to numb her out, but it didn't come. Instead, all she felt was the tug in her chest, as though her heart were a knot, caught between the past at one end, and at the other, the inevitable.

"You okay?" Henry squeezed her shoulder, and then rounded the end of the couch. Jason was balanced on his hip, his eyes in a wide startle one moment, only to droop shut the next.

"That depends." She took another sip, and as he perched on the edge of the coffee table in front of her, she met his eye over the end of the bottle. "How much did you hear?"

"Babe, I think it's safe to say the whole street heard." He smoothed his palm over Jason's back, whilst Jason clung to him in a koala hold. "Did he really have to slam the door like that?"

She flashed him a wry smile. "Well, I guess that's not going to be a problem anymore."

She paused for a moment and gave the words time to settle, and then she shook her head to herself and let her gaze drift away from his. She picked at the dampened label on the beer bottle, prised away the corner, only to tear it and then attempt to smooth it back down. But the translucent fault line remained.

"Look, he's an adult. He's going to do whatever the hell he wants, and you trying to fight him over it is just going to push him away."

"What?" Her voice spiked. "So, this is my fault?" She stared at him. "It's my fault that he's going to end up getting shot or blown up or beheaded?" She swept one hand towards the door, the motion as swift and as sharp as the executioner's blade.

"That's not what I said."

"Then what do I say to make him see sense?"

"You don't."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "So not helpful, Henry."

"Look, he's right: it's his decision to make."

"But he can't pretend like it doesn't affect me."

"At some point you've got to choose to not let it affect you."

She groaned, and as her whole body itched with frustration, she eased to her feet. "I'm really, really not in the mood for Buddhist psychobabble right now."

"It's not Buddhist—"

She shot him a glare, punctuated by the clunk of her bottle against the wooden top of the coffee table.

"Fine." He bounced Jason up and down against his thigh. "Then tell me why it bothers you so much. Tell me why you can't just let him go."

She paced away around the end of the couch. "I don't have time for this." She flicked the switch of the lamp in the corner and cast the room into semi-darkness; the only light came from the amber glare of street lamps that cut through the slats of the venetian blinds and the glow from the bulb at the bottom of the stairs. "And the fact that you even have to ask me that means that you'll never understand."

"Try me."

She shook her head.

"Why not?"

"Because I need to pack." She dragged her fingers through her hair, and then turned back to face him.

A concerned frown nicked his brow, and his bouncing movement stilled.

"Conrad messaged me. They're sending me in." And there was no denying it was a deflection, but it was enough to hold him back, for now at least.

"Can I ask where?"

"You can. But you know I can't answer."

His jaw clenched. "It's Stevie's birthday next week."

"And I promise I'll be back."

"I don't like you going over there. Especially not now. You've got the kids to think about."

"So it's all right for you to worry about my safety, to guilt-trip me over the kids, but it's not okay for me to worry about Will?"

"My worry over you is normal, your worry over Will is…"

She quirked an eyebrow at him. "Yes?"

"Pathological."

"Right." She gave a blunt nod. "Well, I guess that's what you get for being orphaned."

"Elizabeth—"

* * *

**Present Day**

"Elizabeth?"

Henry's voice cut through the haze that dulled her mind, and as he smoothed his palm in circles across her lower back, each cycle coaxed her a step closer to the room, as though he were winding a spool and reeling her in, and then something clicked and she sank back into her body too.

She lifted her head from between her knees, opened her eyes and winced at the light that flooded through the window pane set into the door, a column of brightness that disintegrated at its edges and mingled into the surrounding dimness of the room. Like a blunt tide, the ache from the light bored through her, but behind it trailed a wash of relief.

The sparks, and all the fires that they threatened to ignite, had gone.

"Are you okay?"

She nodded. "Fine. Just nauseous."

The cushions next to her shifted as Henry pushed himself to his feet. He grabbed one of the upturned glasses from the draining board and flipped on the faucet. The water gushed down, and its roar surged through the room. He rinsed the glass out, once, twice, and then filled it three-quarters of the way to the top. The bubbles that frothed at the surface fizzled down as quickly as they had arisen, and by the time he pressed the chill glass into her palm, they had died out completely, except for two or three that clung to the inside of the tumbler.

Just like the remnants of her dream that stuck inside her mind.

She took tentative sips and focused on the way that the drops rolled over the front of her tongue and along the sides before they trickled down her throat, cold at first, refreshingly so, but tepid by the time they made their descent. She focused on their smoothness, on the way that each drop felt as though it had been polished and then slicked with canola oil, until they flowed more seamlessly than pearls over silk. She focused on their taste, the fact that they even had a taste, a metallic tang with an undercurrent of TCP, as though antiseptic fed the hospital's veins.

She focused on each drop in the hope that, just as a memory could quench a spark, perhaps water would douse the images that had, once again, wrenched her from her sleep.

"Feeling any better?"

She clunked the glass down against the floor at the end of the couch. "Much."

And then she sank into the embrace of the cushions and let her head fall back.

So much silence. Just a second of it could stretch into an hour after the constant assault of the ward. Without the bleeps and whirs and clicks and the screech of soles across linoleum floors, it felt like they were drifting on open seas, an expanse of nothingness.

She turned her head to the side and found his gaze waiting for her. More silence, only now it stretched between them, and the peculiarity of the tides threatened to drag them in opposite directions. In that moment, she couldn't say that she would mind. Perhaps that would be easier. Perhaps that would be better for both of them.

"Do you want to talk?" He broke the silence, and the thoughts swept away.

"What about?"

"About what happened earlier."

She frowned at him, and then her gaze darted to the table with the crumpled cardboard packaging strewn across its surface. "About the sandwich?"

"About you yelling at Will."

"Oh." She drew one knee to her chest, and then rested her hands atop it and fumbled with the ends of her cardigan sleeves. She shook her head to herself, and her hair fell forwards and shimmered in a veil between her and Henry. "I always yell at Will. That's what we do."

"Well…are you planning on doing it again?"

"Wouldn't have to if he'd stop being so stubborn and just wake up already." She pushed her knee away and then twisted around to face him; one arm came to rest along the back of the couch whilst she gestured with the opposite hand. "I'm trying my best here, I'm trying to hold everything together and to fix him, I'm doing everything that I can, but he's refusing to cooperate."

Her hand stilled, frozen in mid-air. Then it fell to her lap. Her gaze dipped away from Henry's, and she picked pieces of lint from the rumpled cotton of her sweatpants. "It's like he's trying to prove a point."

_We survived without Mom and Dad, you'll find a way to survive without me too_.

When she looked up at Henry again, he met her with that wide-eyed stare, the one that he wore whenever he was trying to assess what was more terrifying—what she had said, or what her response would be if he were to challenge her thoughts.

"You think I'm obsessing."

"I never said that."

"Then stop giving me that I-married-a-crazy-woman look."

The look eased a fraction. "Is that better?"

"I don't know… It's still a bit 'Mrs McCord, in the family room, with the butter knife'."

The look softened a touch more. "How about now?"

"Well, if that's your best poker face, at least I don't have to worry about you running off to become an undercover agent." A frown gripped the middle of her brow. "Remind me again how you ended up working for the NSA."

"I'm pretty sure I was their only option, and it didn't hurt that my cover was, you know, being myself." A small smile played at the corners of his lips, tentative, as though at any moment she might flip and smother the glimpse of lightness between them.

Not an unreasonable concern.

He slid his hand across the cushion and into her lap, and then paused there, offering her the opportunity to push him away or pull herself back, but when she did neither, he rested his fingers atop her own. "What are you thinking about?"

She let out a soft snort. "So many ways to go with that."

"Then let's start with one."

She turned her hand over, bringing them palm to palm, and then traced her fingertips up and down his fingers as though she were raking the gravel of a karesansui—the gardens she had visited in Tokyo—creating ripples like water to wash away the worst of her thoughts.

Her motion stilled, and she looked up at him with glum smile. "I'm thinking about how I let myself get complacent."

His brow furrowed. "Complacent about what?"

She tugged at his hand. "About Will, of course. I thought that once he stopped flying towards earthquakes and tsunamis and working in war zones he'd be safe. I thought moving back here and taking a hospital job meant that I didn't have to worry about him anymore." Her chin dipped, and as she shook her head, her hair fell forward. "But I don't know. Maybe I jinxed it. Maybe I let my guard down, and maybe that's why this is happening now."

"Babe…this isn't your fault."

"Isn't it?"

"Of course not." He squeezed her hand.

And his touch was too soft, his tone too patient, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes too kind. Everything was too much—too much when she understood nothing at all. It stirred something inside her, something that prickled and barbed and twisted too quick for her catch, let alone name, and before she had felt no more than a glimmer of its presence, it escaped in a shout.

"Then why did it happen?" She yanked her hand free and gestured towards the door. "Why the hell hasn't he woken up?"

Henry stared at her, and even if she had hit him, he couldn't have looked half as stunned.

"I'm serious, Henry. If it weren't for me, he wouldn't have been in the country, let alone in that restaurant. But I'm the one who insisted he would be better off here, I'm the one who invited him out for that meal, I'm the one who they wanted to kill."

Henry's gaze drifted away, and he shook his head to himself and rubbed his brow. The gold of his wedding band gleamed cold in the dim light, and that something inside her stirred further still.

"You should've given him all of the antidote."

Henry froze, dazed at first, as though all of a sudden finding himself stood in front of a firing squad. But then his hand fell back to his lap, his look hardened, and a clench rippled along his jaw. "That's not fair."

"Not fair? Not fair? You could've saved him, Henry, you had the chance to wake him up, but instead you decided that, for God only knows what reason, his life was worth less than mine. And what gave you the right—"

"I treated you equally." His voice strained as he fought to keep it level, yet still it rose a step.

"But why treat us equally when he was clearly worse?"

"I didn't have a choice."

"What do you mean you didn't have a choice? Of course you had a choice. You just made the wrong choice. You should've given him the antidote first."

"It could have killed him, Elizabeth," he shouted. "It could have killed you both."

She stopped. And as he pushed himself to his feet and paced across the room, the words reeled through her mind, shuffling themselves through all their permutations—twelve factorial divided by two factorial to the power four—but not one of them made any sense.

She frowned up at him where he stood in the glare that spilled through the window of the door; one hand clutched at his hip, whilst the other dug fingertips into the knobbles of his neck.

"What?"

His shoulders slumped, and his voice softened. "The antidote could have killed you."

"But…I…I don't understand."

"The doctors didn't know what was going on, how it would react."

Her frown deepened, and she shook her head. "Then why…?"

"Because I hoped it might work, but if it didn't, if it had…" His gaze faltered and then dipped to the expanse of linoleum floor that stretched between them more endlessly than the oceans that had separated them during his tours, her operations, and now her diplomatic work.

When he met her eye again, he gave a small shrug and the corners of his lips twitched into a sorry smile. "Well, at least we wouldn't be in this situation right now."

The way he looked at her was enough to quell the something that had arisen inside her, to return her to the numbness she had once yearned for, and then to tug her over the edge until her whole body ached. "Henry…"

"I don't pretend to understand the two of you—I never have, and I probably never will—but I know how much he means to you, I know how much is riding on your relationship, and I'm sorry that I couldn't do more to help him, but believe me when I say I would've given everything—_everything_—to prevent you from having to go through this."

_Everything_. Including her.

The pain rippled out from him and leached into her every pore, and as it swelled in her veins, a thousand tributaries convening in a river bound to flood, it begged for her to rise from that dingy turquoise couch; to stride across the ocean of linoleum floor; to wrap her arms around him; to bunch his plaid shirt in her fists as she sought refuge in the crook of his neck; to thank him; to tell him everything would be okay; to apologise for the shouting, the anger, the blame; to kiss him; to hold him; to—

But a dam rose amidst those thoughts.

She lowered her gaze and twisted her wedding ring around and around. She swallowed back the thickness that had settled in her throat. "I'm sorry I put you through that."

"As I said, it's not your fault."

But the words still sounded just as false.

Whilst his gaze continued to prickle over her, she stooped down and lifted the suit jacket and binder from where they rested at her feet. "I need to finish up with work. I think maybe you should go home for the night, check on the kids, make sure they haven't burnt down the house or turned it into a meth lab. Give you a chance to get some real sleep, rather than dozing on that cot bed."

She eased to her feet, and then let out a heavy sigh and ambled towards him, the jacket slung over one arm, the file clutched at her hip. Her pace slowed, and she waited for him to step aside. But he stood his ground, just a stride away from the door.

"I think you should come home too."

"Henry—" She tried to step past him, but he caught hold of her elbow.

"You need a break, you need some proper rest, and the kids will want to see you. You haven't been home since—"

"Maybe tomorrow. It's already late, and by the time I'm finished…"

"I can wait." His gaze flickered back and forth as he searched her eyes. "I don't want to leave you here on your own."

"I won't be on my own. I've got the DS guys, and the nurses are here, and there's Will…" She forced a smile. It tasted grim. "I'll be all right."

But his grip on her arm didn't loosen. "Will wouldn't expect you to stay here twenty-four seven, and we both know he certainly wouldn't spend half as much time here were the roles reversed."

"That's true." She gave a curt nod. "And maybe it's true that I need him more than he needs me, but sometimes that's how relationships work." She brushed his touch aside and wrapped her fingers around the door handle, the cool metal soothing against her palm.

"I know you want to be here for him, but it's okay if this is too much for you, it's okay to put yourself first."

The words jarred through her, like a nerve pinched in her neck. Wasn't that what he had said about the presidency, that morning before—

She seized the handle even tighter, until her fingernails bit half-crescents into her flesh of her palms, and she yanked the door open and sent a jolt of pain through her stiffened wrist. The sounds of the ward rushed in through the gap, and she clung to them, to the trill of the phone that echoed down the corridor, to the whoosh of glass doors sliding apart, to the airy notes of a tune hummed by a nurse as she sauntered past. The wisps of thoughts dispersed before they had a chance to thicken, and all that was left was the pounding of her heart.

She propped the door open against the toes of her sneaker and pressed her forehead to the edge of the wood. How long she stayed like that, she couldn't tell: time didn't feel linear anymore. Though that wasn't to say that it had before. When Henry rubbed her upper arm, she glanced sideways and caught his eye. "I hurt all the time, Henry, and being at home isn't going to fix that."

"But being here will?"

"I don't know. But going home feels like…giving up."

His hand stilled against her shoulder, and the pinch in his brow deepened.

She lifted her head from the edge of the door. "Look, it's getting late. You should be heading back, and I need to get through all these documents or else Russell'll be advising Conrad to give away my job and back Teresa Hurst, that is if he hasn't already."

"Are you sure you don't want me to stay?"

"I'll be fine. Really."

His lips tensed, and he still looked far from convinced.

But after a moment or so, his expression softened. Perhaps because he had to trust her, perhaps because he knew she wouldn't back down, or perhaps because he just longed to get away from the ward. "Okay. But if you change your mind—"

She nodded. "You're my number one speed dial—don't tell Russell."

He attempted a smile, but it faded before it formed. They both knew she wouldn't call.

"And I promise I'll try not to shout at Will."

"Good, or else you might find yourself banned from the ward." He leant in and brushed his lips against her forehead—she let him have that—and he swept his hand down her arm to squeeze just above her elbow. "I love you. And I meant what I said: I'd take this all away if I could."

"I know. Tell the kids I miss them, and I'll see you tomorrow." She stepped away and had made it five paces down the corridor when she called back without so much as a glance behind. "And you'd better not be planning on asking DS to babysit me. I don't want to wake up and find someone stood on the other side of that glass wall."

"The thought hadn't even crossed my mind."

"Such a liar," she muttered.

But who was she to talk?

_Pot. Kettle. Black._

* * *

**11:57 PM**

All the lights on the ward had been dimmed, except for the fluorescent strips at the head of each bed, which kept to their perpetual simmer. Elizabeth perched at the edge of the armchair next to Will's bed, and she clutched his hand atop the mattress.

"I used to live day by day, sometimes hour by hour, maybe even minute by minute, but now I live thought by thought, and half of them I have to cast aside because they'd probably lead me down a path I can't afford to take right now. The truth is I don't know what held me together after Mom and Dad died, I have no idea how I survived or how either of us made it to be somewhat functional adults. So you see, Will, you have to wake up, because I need you to tell me, I need you to tell me how we got through it before. I need you to tell me how on earth I'm meant to get through this now."

Her grip on his hand tightened. "You've got to give me something, Will, anything at all. And I never ask anything of you, but right now, I need you to squeeze my hand."

She waited.

Nothing.

"I know you can hear me, so just squeeze my hand."

She waited.

Nothing.

"Please, Will. Squeeze my hand."

* * *

**Thank you for your reviews! They are very much appreciated, and they really do brighten up my day.**


	21. Chapter Nineteen: nothing good comes

**Note:** Now seems a good time to remind all you lovely readers that I am very much still living in the land of Season 4. Thanks to keeping myself in a cave, I managed to avoid all S5 spoilers whilst writing this story. Please enjoy all the unintentional irony as you head off into the sunset of S6.

* * *

**Chapter Nineteen**

**…****nothing good comes of Carlos Morejon.**

**Henry**

**Friday, 2nd November, 2018**

**8:13 AM**

"_Look, we all have family issues, but you don't see the rest of us neglecting our duties. If the secretary isn't able to cope, then perhaps it's time that she resigned, and if she's not going to take her position seriously and show it the respect that it deserves, then President Dalton should do what's right for the country and replace her. It's been nine days. How many more cancelled appearances is he going to let this drag on for? This is just another example of how—"_

Henry snatched the remote control from the kitchen island, pointed it at the television that nestled in the alcove above the microwave and zapped the screen to black. He tossed the remote down onto the marble countertop. It clattered when it hit the surface and then rocked from side to side before settling.

Jason was leaning against the opposite edge of the island, and had been staring up at the television screen whilst he plucked Honey Nut Cheerios in twos and threes from a paper plate (one inked bright red and decorated with snowflakes and a cartoon snowman) and palmed them into his mouth, but when the screen cut out, he twisted around with a scowl. "Hey, I was watching that."

"I think we've heard more than enough from Senator Morejon for today." Henry swirled the dregs of his coffee around the bottom of the mug and then swigged down the last gulp. He turned his back on Jason and rinsed the cup out a couple of times, careful not to topple the tower of dirty dishes that rose up out of the sink like a piece of modern art, and then set the mug down on the draining board. The ceramic chimed off the metal. He dried his hands on the green gingham tea towel that hung from the handle of the cupboard. "Just focus on eating your cereal—" He motioned to the paper plate balanced in Jason's hand. "—and then I'll drop you off at school on my way to the hospital."

No milk in the house, the dishwasher hadn't been run in over a week, the trash had been shoved so far down into the bin that the bag had torn, but all three kids were alive, the house was still standing, and there was no evidence of them having set up a meth lab. That was a success, right?

"Please don't tell me he's watching Morejon _ah-gain_." Stevie bundled down the last few steps and into the kitchen. She plucked a slice of toast from the rack next to the toaster, wiped it with a quick slather of butter, and then sank her teeth into it with a loud crunch and pinned it there as she stuffed her arms into the sleeves of her suit jacket.

"Of course he is." Alison shoved her sketchbook into her bag where it slouched on the tabletop at the end of the room, and then slung the leather straps over her shoulder and held them hoisted in place. "They're practically BFFs." She gave an exaggerated eye roll and clomped through the kitchen, pausing only to give Henry a glancing hug where he leant against the side nearest the sink. "Tell Mom we miss her, and tell Uncle Will to wake up already."

Henry squeezed her shoulder and offered her a smile, one that was meant to be breezy but ended up a bit taut. "I think your mom's got that covered, Noodle."

"Good." She strode towards the coat pegs in the corner. "It's too quiet around here…apart from the far from dulcet tones of Senator Morejon." She shot Jason a look.

Jason met her with a glower. "So what if I take an interest in current affairs? It's better than having a brain full of taffeta." He threw one of the honeyed loops at Alison.

The hoop struck Alison's forehead and clung to fringe. She plucked it free and lobbed it back at Jason. "Actually, it's organza."

Stevie finished checking her reflection in the blackened window of the oven, and sent Alison a glance over her shoulder. "You do realise you're still calling yourself dumb, right?"

"At least I'm not dumb enough to spend half my time listening to Morejon and the other half Facebook-stalking Piper." Alison flashed Jason a sarcastic smile and grabbed a pink pashmina—possibly hers, possibly Stevie's, possibly Elizabeth's—from one of the hooks.

"Hey—" Jason tossed his plate down onto the countertop, and the Cheerios leapt into the air.

At the flash of red that coursed through Jason's cheeks, Stevie let out a cackle. "Busted."

Jason rounded on her. "I'm not Facebook-stalking Piper."

Alison roped the pashmina around her neck. "Then what? Watching Youtube videos of Morejon." She batted her eyelashes, unable to hold back her smirk, not that it looked like she tried too hard, and Stevie collapsed into another peal of laughter.

Jason lunged for Alison, and she recoiled and lifted her arms to shield herself. Stevie caught hold of Jason's wrist and yanked him back. He wrestled himself free, but rather than making a second attempt at Alison, he turned and dashed the plate of Cheerios from the countertop, sending the hoops skittering across the floor, and then stormed towards the stairs.

"Psycho…" Alison muttered, and she gave another eye roll.

Henry rubbed his brow. Why did he ever think that coming home might be more peaceful than staying on the ward?

He shook his head to himself and then pushed himself away from the side. "All right, guys, that's enough." He herded Stevie and Alison towards the door. "Ali, go to college, and drive safely, no earphones. Stevie, White House now, before Russell calls."

"Jase—" He called out, just as Jason stomped onto the second step. "—a word."

"What?" Jason stopped and threw his arms up. "They started it."

Alison glared at him. "You started it."

"How did I start it?"

"With all your obsessing over Morejon." Alison swept her hand towards the television.

Henry groaned and muttered a silent prayer. You'd think the one upside of Elizabeth taking time off work would be not having to deal with Carlos Morejon. "I don't care who started it, and enough already about Carlos Morejon."

"Why?" Jason gave a stilted shrug, a touch of nonchalance, though it was betrayed by the hint of pink that lingered in his cheeks. "Maybe he's right. Maybe Dalton should fire her."

A brief silence bristled over the room.

Henry grappled with what Jason had just said. At first he felt sure he must have misheard him, or perhaps he had misunderstood, but as Jason's lips pursed into a defiant pout, his mind swarmed. After all Elizabeth had done, after all the sacrifices she had made, literally risking her life—. He frowned up at their son. "Excuse me?"

Whilst at the same time, Stevie said, "What?"

Jason's blush deepened. "I happen to think he's got a point."

"You've got to be kidding me." Stevie flung a gesture towards the television screen. "The guy's a total creep who would do anything to see Mom lose her job, and he's just using the whole situation to buy himself more airtime, a situation that he knows nothing about, by the way."

"Yeah, and if Mom had never taken this job in the first place, then we wouldn't be in this situation right now." Jason braced himself against the banister, and his knuckles peaked white through his skin. "Do you know how many people out there want to kill her? Do you know how many death threats you can find online? There're whole forums dedicated to how the world would be a better place without Elizabeth McCord, and all it takes is for one of those nutjobs to get hold of a bomb or a gun or even just a bottle of pills. So maybe Morejon's right, maybe Dalton should fire her, because at least then we wouldn't have to worry that at any moment we might be dragged to some hospital, only to find out that she's already dead and we're just going there to say goodbye." His glaze flicked over each of them in turn, ice cold, whilst the pinch in his brow was all his mother's. "So laugh all you want, make your stupid little jokes, but did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, Morejon's doing us all a favour?"

He paused for a second, as though to give them the opportunity to answer. But then he turned, trudged up the stairs, and left the kitchen to ponder that beneath its shroud of silence.

When Elizabeth had said he ought to go home, Henry had felt sure that she was pushing him away, that he had overstepped the somewhat nebulous boundaries that currently surrounded her. It felt like an excuse, a convenient reason for her to spend the night alone, free to research ways to cure Will without him interrupting her. And as soon as the kids had insisted that they were okay, that he had seen the house was intact, if a little disordered, he had been tempted to get straight back in the car and return to the hospital, to keep her close, to watch over her. But now, as Jason's footsteps faded in their solemn march up the stairs, and the bedroom door shut without even the effort of a slam, he was struck by a pang deeper than that which had come with Elizabeth's anger and blame, because being unable to help Will was not his fault, but failing to recognise his own children's fears and pain because he was too wrapped up in thoughts of their mother…? It reminded him of the time when he had turned his back for no more than a moment, only for a two-year-old Stevie to trip over the lip of a door and cut her chin so deep that it needed three stitches, and the way Elizabeth had reassured him whilst they perched on the vinyl-covered chairs of the emergency department that '_these things happen_', all the while the look on her face chimed with the voice inside that told him '_you should have done better_'.

"So I guess he wasn't Facebook-stalking Piper after all." Alison continued to stare wide-eyed at the space now vacated by her brother.

Stevie's lips bunched to one side. "Though that would probably be preferable to, you know, trawling through forums and reading the stuff people post about Mom."

Alison's brow crumpled into a worried frown. She hitched the straps of her bag higher up her shoulder and looked to Henry. "Mom is safe, isn't she?"

Henry faltered. He offered them both a taut smile. "There are lots of people working hard to find out who did this, and Mom's got a whole hoard of DS agents protecting her."

The words rang just as empty as Russell's reassurances had when he and Conrad had visited them on the ward, though. What good did DS do last time, and if the FBI had no leads, how were they ever going to catch who did this to her? No. Not just to her. To Will. To their family too.

Stevie's cell phone bleeped, and she fumbled it out from her jacket pocket. "Ugh…I've gotta go." She spun on her heel and headed towards the doorway that led into the dining room.

But before she could charge off, Henry called after her, "Hey, wait a sec."

She stopped, and turned to face him, and as she did, she forced a smile, a touch too bright, a touch too wide. "Really, Dad, I'm fine. I'd just rather not think about it, and Adele says Russell wants me to grab the pastries on my way in, so if I don't leave now…" She backed towards the door.

"I'm just saying, you've been through a lot, and if either of you want to talk…"

She gave a quick nod. "We know." She hitched her thumb behind her and continued to back away. "But I've really gotta dash. What with the traffic and the queue to be served and getting through security…" Her smile dwindled along with the excuses. After a second's pause, she spun around and hurried off, and the tap of the soles of her shoes against the floorboards grew fainter and fainter.

He stared after her for a moment, and debated whether to ask what was going on there or why she'd been dodging his calls. Then he shook his head and looked to Alison. "How about you, Noodle?"

"I'm with Stevie. There's enough going on with college, and if it comes down to panicking about coursework or thinking about all the ways people want to hurt Mom, I'd rather stick to my brain full of organza."

* * *

"Jase?" Henry rapped his knuckles against the bedroom door, and when no reply came, he grasped the handle and eased the door open.

Jason was sitting on the window ledge with his knees drawn loosely to his chest, whilst the grey morning light filtered through the net curtains behind him. He glanced across at Henry. His gaze lingered for less than half a second, and then he returned to peering out through the gap between the curtains. "If you're just going to give me the talking points about how the FBI are doing everything they can to catch this guy and how Mom's got a million-and-one agents guarding her, then don't waste your breath. I don't want to hear it."

Henry studied him for a second: the way his jaw clenched as though to cling to a mask of anger, and the way he frittered away that facade by fumbling with the cuff of his plaid shirt.

"Okay." He sank down onto the end of the bed. "Then what do you want me to say?"

Jason continued to stare out of the window. The furrow in his brow deepened.

"Then how about this? The FBI are doing all that they can, there hasn't been a single threat, and she has more security than I care to count…but just like you, I'm worried about her."

Jason turned to him with a scowl. "What?"

"I'm worried about her."

Jason twisted around so that his legs dangled over the ledge. His fingers peeked from the ends of his sleeves and curled over the lip of wood, and his nails dug into the chipped white paint. "You are?"

"Of course." Henry gave a small shrug. "I worry that at any moment I'm going to receive a call and it's going to be someone telling me that something's happened to her, I worry that the next time I rush to the hospital she'll already be gone and there'll be nothing I can do to help her, I worry that I might've already seen her for the last time and I won't remember what the last words were that I said to her."

"Then how can you just get on with things and pretend like nothing's happened? How can you ignore the fact that so long as she has this job people are going to want to hurt her?"

"I'm under no illusions about what's happened, but unfortunately this isn't the first time that I've come close to losing her, and as consuming as the worries might be right now, eventually they'll pass, and life'll return to normal, or a new kind of normal at least. It always does."

"So that's your advice? Just wait and it'll go away."

Henry nodded. "But the trick is to keep just enough of that fear so that you remember to make the most of every moment that you have, because the truth is that none of us know how long we've got, whether you're secretary of state or just an average Joe."

Jason's lips twisted as he chewed on the inside of his cheek. "I'm pretty sure average Joe doesn't have people trying to poison him."

"That's true…well, in most cases anyway." Henry's gaze drifted for a moment as his mind tangled in the thread of that thought. Then his gaze sharpened again on Jason. "Look, we can go around and around the argument over whether Mom's at risk because of her job, or if in balance she's safer because she's surrounded by DS…and because they won't let her drive anything more than a golf cart, which—trust me—makes us all a lot safer—"

A smile cracked through Jason's expression, just a glimmer.

"—but her quitting or having President Dalton fire her isn't the answer. Because if that happens, then whoever did this will have won, they'll have managed to silence her."

"But surely it's better that she's silent and alive."

Henry paused. His lips tugged to one side as he pondered the point. "Sometimes I think that, but then again, if she were silent, she wouldn't be your mother. She's always been outspoken whether it was arguing me down during a college seminar, or advocating for changes in the CIA, or debating the PTA, or dealing with university politics. And I wouldn't want to change that, not for a second, because that passion, that desire to make the world a better place, is what brings her alive."

"And I know that. I know what she does is important, and I see how much she loves her job, even if she complains about it, like, all the time, but…" Jason trailed off, and then he gave a slight shake of the head and let his gaze dip to the floor.

Henry eased up from the bed, leant back against the window ledge next to Jason, and nudged Jason's arm. "But what?"

"But…" Jason gave a small shrug. "I just don't want anybody to hurt her."

The words struck an ache deep in Henry's chest, whilst Elizabeth's voice played through his mind—_I hurt all the time, Henry_— along with the look in her eyes, a darkness, a distance, as though she—the real her—were obscured by a fog of pain. Or maybe in truth that pain was inseparable from her, something that had always lingered and surfaced from time to time in her melancholic moments and down days, those times when she was 'away with the horses'.

When she had first told him about her parents, she claimed that the loss had hardened her, had made her grow up too quickly, and it was true that she was strong and independent and certainly more mature than most others her age, but the more time he spent with her, watching her inner world open up, like learning a castle room by room, the more he came to see her other side, one filled with need, an acute sense for loss and failure, an undeniable vulnerability.

In a way he felt grateful to her for opening up to him like that, as though she had bestowed him with a certain privilege, an unspoken trust that stretched like the thread of a spider's web between them, but at the same time it pained him that he was the one chosen to witness that hurt, a trapped bystander to that suffering, because—as he had told her—there was nothing he wouldn't do to take that ache away, but sometimes it felt like all he could do was stand by her and wait for that fog to fade.

He covered Jason's hand where it curled over the edge of the ledge. "Nor do I."

A lull settled between them, long enough to hold the weight of the words.

Jason shot him a sideways glance. "Do you think Dalton will fire her?"

"I think there's a better chance of Morejon winning the next election."

Jason's eyebrows arched and his tone lifted a fraction. "I hear his approval rating's rising."

"Don't tell your mother." Henry raised a finger at him in warning, and then his hand fell back against the ledge and his gaze turned distant. "If he ever did become president, I'm pretty sure we'd be emigrating…that is, if he couldn't devise a way to exile her first."

"Good thing she's got her very own Babel fish."

Henry chuckled.

"That reminds me. I have Spanish in, like, a half hour." Jason jumped down from the ledge, and then snatched up his rucksack from the foot of his bed. He slung the strap over his shoulder and clutched it in one hand as he paced backwards towards the door. "Any chance I can still get that lift? If I'm late again, I'll end up in detention."

Henry shook his head to himself. "See—" He pushed himself away from the ledge, and when he caught up with Jason, he grabbed him by the shoulders and squeezed until he squirmed. "Nothing good comes of Carlos Morejon."

"I'll admit his interviews are a little bit repetitive, and the only time he breaks that monotone is when he's slagging off Mom." Jason walked along the landing. When they neared the top of the stairs, he glanced back at Henry and his expression sobered. "When you said you almost lost her before…were you talking about what happened in Iran?"

"Yes." Henry's own smile faded, and he gripped Jason's shoulder. "But there were others."

"You mean when she was in the CIA?"

Henry paused, and then nodded. "Then too."

* * *

**2001**

"Henry, he's beautiful." Elizabeth gazed down at their son where she cradled him against her chest. Their baby boy peered up at her with his dark blue eyes as he nursed for the first time.

Henry nestled closer to her side, wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her sweat-slicked brow. "Just like his mom."

He could have spent a lifetime sat there, watching over the two of them. He hadn't thought it would matter to him whether they had a boy or another girl, yet every time the words crossed his mind 'our son', another bud of joy blossomed in his chest.

"Our son." He had to try the words out loud. They sounded foreign yet familiar all at once.

Elizabeth smiled up at him. But as quickly as her pain had turned to euphoria, her expression fell and her face blanched. "Henry, I don't—"

She slumped back against his arm, and her eyes rolled to white.

"Elizabeth…? Elizabeth…?"

The midwife spun around, took one look at Elizabeth and then slapped the alarm button on the wall.

After that, everything moved so fast that it whipped into a blur, and before Henry knew it, he found himself alone in the room, a pool of blood creeping out across the grey linoleum, the trundle of the bed and the shouts of the midwife fading down the corridor, whilst in his arms, still rooting for somewhere to latch on, he held his son. Her son. Their son. Even if she had gone.

* * *

**It always interests me to read what you guys pick up on in each chapter, so keep your thoughts coming! :)**


	22. Chapter Twenty: trust no one

**Chapter Twenty**

**…****trust no one.**

**Conrad**

**8:13 AM**

"_Look, we all have family issues, but you don't see the rest of us neglecting our duties. If the secretary isn't able to cope, then perhaps it's time that she resigned, and if she's not going to take her position seriously and show it the respect that it deserves, then President Dalton should do what's right for the country and replace her. It's been nine days. How many more cancelled appearances is he going to let this drag on for? This is just another example of how President Dalton's judgment is clouded by friendship and nepotism—"_

Conrad slapped the laptop shut and the sound snapped through the air of the Oval Office. He leant back in his chair and a deep frown gripped his brow, whilst the tension inside him twisted, ever-tightening like the corkscrew landing he had endured on his way into Vietnam.

His gaze shot up to Russell, and he rocked forward in his seat and thrust one hand at the closed screen. "Where the hell does he get off telling me how to do my job? The man doesn't have a clue what's going on, yet still he's jumping at any opportunity for political grandstanding."

Perched against the arm of the couch, Russell held his hands out wide and shrugged. "What can I say? It's DC, and you know Morejon: he's had it in for Bess and this administration from the very beginning. Besides—" With a heavy sigh, he pushed himself up to standing. "—his daily sermons might be the least of our problems."

Conrad eyed Russell. "Why don't I like the sound of that?"

Russell took a deep breath, and then braced himself, his hands on his hips. "My sources tell me he's not buying into the whole 'family illness' storyline."

"What's there to buy into? Her brother's in a coma for God's sake."

"Apparently he's instructed his flying monkeys to start digging around. I'm not sure what he's hoping to find, but if he traces it back to the hospital and one of the nurses gets chatty—"

"He could go to the press with what happened and scupper the whole investigation, not to mention raising serious questions about our credibility." Conrad's jaw clenched. His gaze drifted away from Russell and settled on the gauze curtains that fluttered in the draught, the light too bleak to illuminate the Secret Service agents who stood guard on the walkway beyond.

"Right now he's just flailing for information, but it might be prudent of us to get ahead of this, before he has a chance to take control of the narrative."

"You mean make an official statement about what happened?"

Russell gave a half-shrug. "It's an option."

Conrad leant back in his seat, and as he considered the suggestion, he drummed his fingers against the leather armrest. A rhythmless beat. "I guess the political fallout'll be more tolerable if we decided to come clean now, but the investigation'll be swamped. The chance for people to say they succeeded in poisoning the secretary of state, and on US soil no less? There'll be no end to the radicals and organisations jumping on the bandwagon and claiming responsibility."

"Well, it's not like the investigation's going anywhere fast anyway."

"Has there been any update?"

Russell lowered himself into the chair next to Conrad's desk, and then leant back and crossed one leg over the other. His arms lay along the length of the armrest. "Looks like Bess's devices were clean and the sweep of their house turned up nothing, so at least we don't foresee an issue with State or any sensitive conversations being leaked, but seeing as she's being less than cooperative with the investigation, the FBI don't have much to go on."

Conrad arched his eyebrows. "I'd hardly call amnesia being 'less than cooperative'."

"Call it what you want—" Russell tossed his hands up. "—the fact is, it doesn't help the situation. Though…perhaps releasing some of the details to the public would."

"What are you getting at?"

"There've been no sightings of Elizabeth since the poisoning—her insistence on staying in that glass box has all but ensured that—so as far as the public are concerned, she might as well be dead. However, if whoever did this were to find out that they've failed, perhaps it'll be enough to lure them out of hiding and provoke them into making a second attempt."

Conrad's eyebrows inched even higher. "You plan on using Bess as bait?"

"It's not as though we're going to drop her into enemy territory and leave her to fend for herself. Just release the details and see what happens. DS and the FBI will be ready."

Conrad gave a wry smile. "Have fun trying to sell Henry on that one."

"The guy's not her keeper. Geez—" Russell arched back in his seat and clutched his head. "—it's like his brain's stuck on some caveman logic loop: Must protect woman."

"He loves her."

"We all have our faults."

"But putting Bess at risk like that?" Conrad shook his head. "I won't do it. They've been through enough already."

"Not even if a little bit of pain now means that we catch the bastard? We can clear the air, put an end to Morejon's preaching, bring the people responsible for this to justice." Russell tapped his fingers against the desk, a beat to emphasise each point. Then he shrugged. "Hell, we can even spin that as a victory." His gaze drifted away and his tone dropped to little more than a mutter. "And it takes care of one half of the problem, at least."

Conrad braced himself against the desk and rose to his feet. He towered over Russell, and sent him a hard look. "I'm not doing it, Russell. Not unless we've exhausted all other options." He stepped away, stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, and paced towards the windows behind his desk. "If the FBI are struggling, then perhaps it's time we put the IC on it. Widen the search."

"There's no evidence to indicate a foreign actor."

"There's nothing to contradict that theory either, and foreign powers are certainly trying their best to make the most of the situation." Conrad turned his chin to his shoulder, and sent Russell a half-glance. "Put intelligence on it, and if that doesn't work, we can circle back later. In the meantime, find something to keep Senator Morejon busy, and if anyone tries taking anything to the press, kill it. As far as I'm concerned, it's an issue of national security."

Russell gave a curt nod and eased up from his seat. "Yes, sir."

Conrad returned to the window, to the dull day that skulked outside, brightened only by the pink sunbursts of chrysanthemums and the purple rosettes of flowering kale. Russell's footsteps faded across the carpet, but the sound of the door opening never came.

"Sir?"

Conrad turned around.

Russell was hovering by the grandfather clock, his expression a touch more grim than usual, as though he were walking barefoot over a field of drawing pins at just the thought of what he was about to say. "Maybe we should consider the possibility that Morejon's right. Maybe it's time to bring someone else in at State."

"Replace Bess?" Conrad's eyes widened. He suppressed the huff of a laugh that fought to escape him, and he shook his head. "Not happening, Russell."

Russell threw his arms wide. "We can't let this drag on forever."

It was true, foreign policy couldn't be conducted from a hospital ward, not in the long run anyway, but Elizabeth would be back soon. Hell—how many times in the past had he been forced to send her home from work, to insist that she took a break?

"What do State say?"

Russell ran one hand over his scalp, scratched, and then shook his head to himself and gave a reluctant shrug. "Apparently she's been doing some work at the hospital, I had them check in on her last night and her speechwriter said she seemed okay; Henry insists that she's fine, that is when he deigns to take my calls; Stevie's just parroting whatever her father says, and's acting like I'm Iago…"

Conrad raised his eyebrows. "What on earth could possibly make her think that?" Then his expression softened. "Look, I told Bess she can take the time she needs, and I mean to honour that. I know you're concerned. The situation's far from ideal, and Morejon's certainly not helping matters, but just give her a chance to find her feet. Besides—" He rocked forward and gave Russell an almost taunting smile. "—you wouldn't want it to look like I'd capitulated to the good senator, would you?"

Russell paused, and his gaze turned distant. "It's true that he'd bring a whole new meaning to the word 'insufferable', and I'd rather burn my eyes out than see his smug face…" His gaze sharpened again, and the corners of his lips tweaked—not so much a smile as a kind of defeat. "But it might be worth the hit. As I said, a little bit of pain now…"

"And as I said: not happening, Russell. If State says she's doing the work and Henry says she's fine, I see no reason to rock the boat."

"Better to rock it," Russell muttered, "than to have the whole damn thing capsize." With his shoulders slumped, he grasped hold of the door handle, sent Conrad a brief nod—"Sir.—and then tugged open the door.

In that two second gap before the door thunked back into its frame, the bustle of the White House, with its trill of telephones, the chatter of staffers, and the faraway lilt of laughter, rushed in. The sounds dissolved into a silence thicker than before, one that the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the grandfather clock thudded and juddered against.

_Trust no one._ Practically the motto of the CIA. But a fallacy too, because with the work they did, the horrors they saw, the secrets they shared, it was impossible not to trust each other, perhaps to trust each other more than their own families, maybe even to become a family of a different kind.

But in politics? _Trust no one_. Now that was a motto you could live by.

* * *

**Sorry for the short chapter. (In Part Five I'll be apologising for the long chapters...)**

**More tomorrow?**


	23. Chapter Twenty-One: the eternal essen

**Chapter Twenty-One**

**…****the eternal essence of the soul.**

**Henry**

**10:31 AM**

Henry's heart reversed a beat and his grip on the takeaway coffee cups slipped as he halted outside the room on the ICU. Elizabeth no longer sat at the edge of Will's bed, the same position she had occupied for the past four days, but she had hauled one of the armchairs over to the table in the corner and was hunched over an open binder, her reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose as she dragged the tip of her index finger along the lines of text.

The image overlaid the trace in his mind, the memory of being twenty-one years old, transfixed as he stared at her through the arched window of the library at UVA: the way the sunlight shimmered on her hair, tied up in a ponytail, but with loose strands wisping around her face; the way she would pause from time to time and tap the end of her biro against her lips as her brow furrowed and she peered down at the page; the way she would look up, a split second of startle when she caught sight of him, before she rolled her eyes and then smiled so bright that everything around her faded into a haze.

The memory dimmed and returned him to the ward, where the covers of the cot bed still held to the hospital corners he had folded the morning before, and the slight jitter in Elizabeth's movements seconded the theory that, once again, she had foregone sleep. But as he watched her through the glass wall, it felt as though something about her had changed, as if, just for a moment, the agitation that itched beneath her skin had eased and she had found a glimpse of peace.

If only there were a way to preserve it, like a vein of air bubbles trapped in amber, a kind of nutrient that would never fade. But something told him it was too fragile for that, and even if he were to leave her there, undisturbed, engrossed in whatever she was reading, sooner or later something would happen, or nothing would happen, and still the moment would deflate.

He nudged the button on the wall, careful not to slosh the coffee through the holes in the white plastic lids, and then waited for the swoosh of the glass door to whisk away the ghostly outline of his reflection before he stepped into the room.

Elizabeth cast him half a sideways glance. "Hey." Then her gaze settled on the file again.

"Good morning," he murmured. He placed one of the takeaway coffee cups—triple shot latte (extra foam)—down on the table in front of her and then smoothed his palm over her shoulder blades. The wool of her chunky-knit cardigan fuzzed against his skin. He leant in and kissed the top of her head, and the faint scent of her coconut shampoo unravelled through him. "I missed you."

"You've only been gone a few hours." Her tone dragged, and the distance in her voice made it feel like the pane of glass still separated them.

His heart stung. "Even so."

Silence fell between them. Thick. The kind that ached and strained.

He squeezed her shoulder, lingered there for a moment longer, waited for a response that he knew wouldn't come, and then his grip loosened. He moved to step away, but before he could, her hand darted up and covered his own, her fingertips so cold that the chill bit into his skin.

She held his hand to her shoulder whilst she continued to stare at the page. Her voice kept its distance. "Thank you for the coffee."

He stumbled for a reply before he landed on a tentative, "You're welcome."

A pause. He expected her to let go and for them to drift apart again, but her touch remained.

He perched on the arm of her chair, careful not to let his fingers slip from beneath hers, and he studied her as her chin dipped and her gaze fell away from the file. A frown settled on his brow, and he squeezed her shoulder again. "Everything all right?"

She swallowed, the sound heavy in the surrounding hush. "Henry, about yesterday…" She turned her head from side to side and set her hair trembling. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…"

His frown deepened, and his grip on her shoulder tightened. Whether she meant the way she'd shouted at him, the way she'd blamed him, the way she'd pushed him away, he didn't know, but she could hurl whatever she wanted at him—figuratively preferably to literally—and his answer would always be the same. "It's okay."

She nodded, but only a small nod, one that said she wasn't entirely convinced. Then she tugged off her reading glasses, folded the plastic arms against the frames, and slipped them into her cardigan pocket. She twisted around in the armchair to face him. Her eyes flickered slightly as she stared up at him and fought to hold his gaze. It looked as though she were searching for something, but what that was, he couldn't tell; all he could see was the watery glaze that dulled the once crisp blue and the threads of pink and red that wove through the white.

"Did you get any sleep?"

She shrugged. "A little." When his gaze darted to the pristine cot bed, she added, "I napped on the couch in the family room when the nurses turfed me out this morning."

But staying up all night until she had no choice but to crash out on the couch wasn't good enough; she was meant to be getting rest, proper rest. "Maybe you should have another lie down—"

"No." She braced herself against the table and eased to her feet. She turned around, leant back against the wood, and tilted her head towards the door. "Dr Owens should be coming round soon, and I wanted to talk about options."

He laid his hand on top of her fingers where they wrapped over the edge of the table. "You can take five minutes. Dr Owens will understand if he needs to come back later."

She pulled her hand free, and with fingers arched, she rested her hand, along with her gaze, atop the pages of the file splayed open on the tabletop behind her. She wore the same expression that she did when composing herself before a speech, though it was half veiled by the hair that fell across her face, and within a nanosecond of her meeting his eye again, that facade crumbled and collapsed into a wince. "Some of these studies look really promising, Henry, and I think if they'd only agree to try them, one of them might just work. It might make him wake up."

His lips tightened. _And what if it doesn't? What if this is it now? Will you come home?_

Her gaze fell to her sneakers, their laces untied and tongues slackened, and she shook her head until the ends of her hair quavered. "I know you probably think I'm crazy…"

"I don't think you're crazy."

She shot him a look, one that said he must be crazy if he expected her to believe that.

"I don't."

Still the look didn't ease.

He tipped his head towards the file. "So, tell me about them."

"What?"

"Tell me about the studies."

"Really?"

"Sure." He shrugged. It wasn't the rest that she needed, and part of him felt like he was indulging her, but—perhaps a little selfishly—he wanted to be close to her, to have her talk to him, to preserve the moment of calm for as long as he could. He ventured a smile. "Talk science to me."

The corners of her lips tweaked upwards in response, not a true smile, but a start. She motioned towards the cot bed, and then gathered up the file and her cup of coffee.

With his own coffee cup clutched in one hand, he sank down onto the thin mattress and scooted backwards until his shoulder blades found the cold bite of the wall.

She ambled towards him. Draped in the cardigan, sweatpants and tee that had all fit her so perfectly only a couple of weeks before but now hung in soft billows of fabric like empty sails, she looked more material than anything else. He missed the familiar comfort of her curves; he missed the time when his biggest challenge was persuading her that she had no reason to feel self-conscious about how her body had softened over the past few years; he missed being able to hold her and talk to her without fearing that she might snap.

"So, how are the kids?"

"They're…" He faltered, and his gaze drifted away from her, in search of the diplomatic answer, one that didn't involve relaying the events of that morning.

She stopped in front of the bed, and when he still hadn't replied, she nudged his feet with her shin, drawing his gaze up to her, and she arched her eyebrows at him.

He let out a sharp breath and massaged his brow. "They're keeping busy."

"_Busy, _huh?" She passed him her coffee and then clambered onto the mattress beside him. She hauled herself back so that they were shoulder to shoulder, her legs stretched out in front of her, and then she pulled the binder into her lap. She retrieved her cup, took a sip, and shot him a look over the plastic lid. "Do I even want to ask what 'busy' entails?"

"They just miss you, that's all. And this whole situation…" He glanced to Will where he lay on the bed in the middle of the room, just the same as ever. He understood now how the nurses could come to see such patients as part of the landscape of the ICU, when they were as unchanging and unresponsive as the furniture. "It's a lot for them to get their heads around, especially when they don't have any kind of closure."

She studied him, and as the seconds clunked by, something beneath the surface of her eyes hardened. "You think I'm being selfish by staying here, by not being there for them."

"Of course not." He covered her hand where it rested atop the open file, mindful of the deep purple bruise that plumed across her tendons, wary that she might jerk away from his touch. "I would prefer it if you were at home, and I think it would be better for you and for the kids. But I've already told you, if this is where you feel you need to be, then I'll do my best to support you."

"So, you're not going to guilt-trip me?"

"No." _But you can't stay here forever._

The silence between them thickened. She continued to stare at him and her eyes narrowed a fraction, as though she were assessing whether or not she could believe him. But then she gave a curt nod. "Good." She turned away, leafed through the pages of the file, and added in a mutter, "Because I've got enough of that going on already."

_There's no reason for you to feel guilty_. The words strained on the tip of his tongue, but he held them back as memories of the night before, of what had happened when he told her that none of this was her fault, resurfaced in his mind. He should never have let the FBI talk to her; that's when this had all started, after they'd all but blamed her for being unable to help with the investigation.

"So, what else's been going on?"

"Not much." He sipped on his Americano, and the hot liquid unfurled across his tongue, smooth but with a bitter kick. "Maureen called when I was getting the coffees."

She shot him a look. "Why?"

"It's been all over the news that there's an illness in the family, so she was concerned."

She shook her head and returned to the binder. "Well, I bet she lost interest pretty quickly, like about a tenth of a second after she found out you and the kids were fine."

He floundered. The call had ended pretty abruptly after that, lasting just long enough for her to bring up the possibility of visiting DC in a couple of weeks' time. Though if he ever wanted Elizabeth to come home, he'd be better off not mentioning that. "She's not that bad."

"Henry, the woman hates me."

"She doesn't hate you. She just—"

Elizabeth pinched the bridge of her nose, and the rose gold of her anchor ring caught the glare of the fluorescent lights. Her expression turned pained.

"You okay?"

She sat like that for a moment, perfectly still, and then shook her head. "Fine."

But as her hand fell back to the file and she thumbed through the pages, her fingers trembled, just enough to make her fumble the edges of the sheets.

"Have you had anything to eat today?"

She turned another page and the rasp of paper curling over paper unfurled into the room. "Well, there's milk in this coffee."

He scrubbed his face. "Elizabeth—"

"I was busy, okay?"

"And you couldn't take five minutes to eat?"

"I forgot."

He sent her an incredulous look. "You forgot?"

She twisted around and glared at him. "Yes, Henry, I forgot." Her gaze simmered to the point that it burned like sulphuric acid over his skin. She gestured to the file. "There's this study that I found, I had to ask Blake to get me the full version, but he couldn't find it in English, so I've been translating it, and I lost track of time. You know how wrapped up I get."

So, that's what had brought her that glimmer of peace… Immersing herself in a foreign text. A comfort second only to that which she found in numbers. Didn't he use to factor somewhere in that list…? Even so, it felt too convenient, a part truth designed to cover something else.

"Are you still feeling nauseous?"

She bowed her head and her hair swept forward; a soft shimmer radiated off the strands beneath the bright lights. She glanced up again, and her lips quirked into a sorry smile. "A bit."

His grip on his coffee cup tightened as he resisted the urge to tuck her hair back and then brush his thumb across the angle of her cheek. "Well, not eating and not sleeping isn't going to help. I really think you should take a break."

She opened her mouth to protest.

But he continued, "You can talk to Dr Owens, see about next steps, but then I think you should come home for the night, get some rest and a proper meal, spend a little time with the kids, and I promise I'll bring you back first thing in the morning."

She shook her head. "Henry, I—"

The swish of the glass door cut through the room. She flinched and spun around.

Dr Owens stepped inside. He nodded towards them and offered them both a stiff smile as he hovered near the door. "Madam Secretary. Dr McCord. Is now a good time?"

"Now's perfect." Elizabeth motioned to the armchair in front of the table. "Have a seat."

She eased away from the wall, away from Henry's side, away from the conversation, and scooted towards the edge of the cot bed.

But Henry caught hold of her elbow and drew her attention back to him, just for a moment. "Just think about it, okay?"

She eyed him, and then nodded.

Though just like the previous evening, when she had said that she might come home 'tomorrow', he struggled to believe her.

"How are you feeling?" Dr Owens asked as he gripped the back of the armchair and walked it over so that it faced the cot bed. "Headaches gone? The nausea?"

"Getting better."

He swept his lab coat back and sank into the seat. "Any memories coming back?"

"None." She arched her hand on top of the open file. "I've been reading up on possible treatments for my brother. There are some—"

Dr Owens raised one hand. "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Oh?" She studied his expression. And then her shoulders slumped. "Oh."

At the drop in her tone, Henry wedged his coffee cup in the gap between the mattress and the wall, and he scooted to her side and rested his hand against her lower back. But she tensed beneath his touch and squirmed away.

"You're not going to try any more treatments, are you?"

Dr Owens leant forward in his seat, causing the front of his navy blue scrubs to crumple, and as he clutched his hands in front of him, the grey of his eyes glazed, just as it had done in the moment before he'd told Henry that Elizabeth had collapsed due to seizures. "I've spoken with a number of colleagues about your brother's case, and we've reviewed the available literature, and it's our general consensus that further treatment would not be beneficial at this stage."

Elizabeth's chin dipped. "Right." She massaged her brow. The pads of her thumb and forefinger dinted the translucent skin of her temples. "So, your plan is to do nothing, to just leave him in a coma?"

"We will of course continue to monitor your brother and provide him with all the support he needs, but we won't be actively trying to wake him up, no."

Elizabeth's hand stilled, but she continued to pinch her temples, her gaze fixed on the floor. She swallowed, but gravel clung to her tone, and the coat thickened as her voice rose step by step. "So, you won't give him any more of the antidote, or try to stimulate his brain, or try any one of the miracle drugs that have worked on other patients?"

Dr Owens shook his head. "No." He cleared his throat. "We uh…we think that any such treatments are unlikely to work and carry a significantly higher risk of doing harm than good."

Elizabeth dropped her hand from her forehead, and her head snapped up. "So, you'll just continue to support him in this crappy nonexistence but you're not willing to take a risk, a risk like—oh, I don't know—giving him an antidote that might possibly kill him, but could give him a chance of having a real life?"

"Elizabeth." Henry touched her elbow, but she swatted him away.

A flush of crimson spread up Dr Owens's neck. "When we originally gave you the antidote, it did come with its risks, but it was our only viable option, and had we done nothing, then death was a near certainty, or in hindsight an inevitability, but the situation's different now. Dr Adams's life is not in immediate danger—"

"His life? You call that—" Elizabeth thrust her hand towards where Will lay on the bed in the middle of the room. "—a life?"

"He's stable. His test results have all been good. We can't find anything to indicate an underlying pathology, and while that's positive in itself, it also means that we have no idea what's going on, why your brother hasn't woken up, or what course of treatment would actually help."

"So, what do you prescribe then? And if you say 'time', I swear to God—"

"Elizabeth." Henry warned her again, louder this time.

She rose up from the bed, dumped the file on the table, and then flicked through the pages so fast that the scrape of paper on paper filled the room.

Dr Owens twisted around in his seat and tracked her movements. "I understand your frustration—"

"Oh, I don't think you do."

"—but with time, the picture should become clearer. We'll get a better idea of what's going on and—"

"Here." Elizabeth tore a handful of pages out of the file, spun around and shoved them towards Dr Owens. "I found this pilot study in Germany—"

Dr Owens held up one hand, like he might were he declining the wine menu at a restaurant. "I don't speak German, I'm afraid."

Elizabeth clutched her hip with one hand, whilst the other flapped the sheets of paper so hard that they released a snap. "And I don't speak 'doctor' but even I get the gist. Look—"

She lowered the pages, and held them out in front of Dr Owens as she jabbed her finger at the text. "A case of poisoning resulting in coma. The antidote had toxic byproducts, limiting the amount that they could give without causing harm, so they gave the antidote and some form of perfusion at the same time, so they could remove the byproducts as they formed, enabling them to administer a higher dose."

Dr Owens frowned at the paper. His gaze skittered over the text as though he were trying to pick out key words not lost in translation. Then he looked up at Elizabeth. "With diasiozin poisoning?"

Elizabeth opened her mouth, her tongue poised, her breath stilled, then—"No."

Dr Owens sank back from the edge of his seat.

"But it's the same principle, surely."

Dr Owens rubbed the stubble along his jawline and shook his head to himself. He lowered his hand to the armrest, and bounced his fingers against the wood before he met Elizabeth's gaze once more. He spoke slowly, as though he were trying to explain calculus to a third grader. "Different drugs have different properties. The efficacy of such a treatment would depend on the difference in the molecular weights of the antidote and its byproducts, and it would depend on their solubility. Not to mention the fact that the types of haemoperfusion columns available in the United States differ from those available in Europe."

The edge to Elizabeth's voice softened, slumping down from its peak, though her tone lost none of its grit. "What I'm hearing is that you're not going to do anything, that you're not even willing to try."

"As I said, we'll continue to monitor and support your brother, and—"

"What are his chances?" Elizabeth turned away and retreated to the table.

Dr Owens frowned. "I'm sorry?"

Elizabeth dumped the torn pages on top of the file, and then turned around and rested back against the desk. She folded her arms across her chest, and her fists bunched the wool of her cardigan so tight that her knuckles sprang white through her skin. "What are his chances of waking up?"

"In a case like this, I couldn't say."

"Well, on a scale from one to ten? With one being an American citizen winning the next election and ten being a freaking miracle." Her voice cracked as it rose again.

"Miracles do happen. Over time we find new treatments, and of course we'll continue to reassess as the picture changes."

Elizabeth stared him hard in the eye. "So, that's an eleven?"

"That's not what I said." Dr Owens leant forward in his seat again. "Look…I know we've agreed to allow you to stay here on the ward, but I think maybe it's best if you take some time at home, still come and visit of course, but you need to take care of yourself too, you need to—"

"Adjust my expectations?"

Dr Owens opened his mouth, but Elizabeth pushed herself away from the desk and strode across to the armchair on the opposite side of the room. With her back to Dr Owens and Henry, she clutched the top of the chair and dug her nails into its stone blue cushion.

"Madam Secretary…" Dr Owens twisted around in his seat.

She shook her head and the ends of her hair quivered at her shoulders, like sunlight rippling on disturbed waters. "I think we're done here."

"If we could just—"

"Don't." Her nails rasped over the fabric. "Please, just leave."

"Madam—"

"Now." The word shot from her mouth and fractured into silence.

Dr Owens looked to Henry, perhaps pleading for assistance, perhaps just asking for permission to do as she said and leave.

Henry gave him a nod, and then tipped his chin towards the door. He waited until the doctor had made his retreat and the squeak of trainers against the vinyl flooring had faded into aching silence before he eased himself up from the edge of the bed. With his hands stuffed into the front pockets of his jeans, he took several ambling steps towards Elizabeth. Three paces away from her, he stopped—just close enough for her shoulders to prick at his presence, not so close as to make her freeze.

"Elizabeth…"

"Well, it looks like you got what you wanted."

A frown worked its way across his brow. "I'm sorry, what?"

She spun around to face him. Her eyes were rimmed red, the whites bloodshot, and her lashes were spiked with tears. "You wanted me to come home—" She gestured to the cot bed, to the ghost of their conversation. "—and now they're saying there's no reason for me to stay. So, congratulations. I hope you're happy."

She pushed past him and swiped at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve.

"Elizabeth, no one's saying you have to leave. If you want to stay—"

She stopped, and turned to him. "What's the point?"

Her gaze bored into him, utterly empty.

"Seriously, Henry, what is the point?"

When he offered no reply, she retreated to the table and yanked the charger free from her phone. "I've failed. I was meant to look after him, to keep him safe, and I've failed."

He stepped closer. "You've not failed. Dr Owens didn't say—"

"I heard what he said. _Miracles happen_. Well, guess what? Miracles, faith, hope: they're a luxury." She punched in her passcode and then dabbed at her eyes again; the heel of her palm pressed through the cuff of her sleeve. She scrolled down the screen as she paced towards the door. "I need to call Sophie."

"I think maybe you should wait. Just take a minute."

"Why?" She met his eye in the reflection of the glass. "What difference will time make?"

She waited.

No reply.

She jabbed the button on the wall. "I'm done, Henry."

* * *

"Tell me about the soul," Elizabeth had said one day as they sat side by side in the library. The sunlight streamed in through the arched window and spooled across the surface of the oak desk.

Henry stopped writing, his pen frozen mid-sentence, and he turned to stare at her. _Where on earth had that come from?_ "Well, that's a pretty broad topic…and I have a seminar in five."

She laughed, the kind of laugh that lit up his heart and lingered on in her eyes. Then she reached across the desk and clasped his hand. "Then tell me one thing, anything."

"Okay then." He twisted around in his seat to face her, whilst she propped her elbow atop the desk and rested her chin to the heel of her palm, ever the attentive student. "There are lots of different theories about what the soul is or whether in fact it exists, and pretty much every religion or school of philosophy has its own take. For example, the Hindu concept of Atman suggests that there is such a thing as an essential self, or soul, something intrinsic that never changes; whereas, in contrast, the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta states that although beings may possess a soul, it—like everything else—will continue to evolve, as there is no such thing as a permanent state."

Her hand crept across the desk, and she trailed her fingertips along the length of his fingers, forever holding his gaze. "And what do you believe?"

He thought for a second, though most of those thoughts were devoted to the way that her fingertips grazed over his skin. "I believe that there's a part of us, something that we're born with, that always remains the same."

"So…" Her gaze dipped for a moment, and her fingers stilled against his as the barest hint of a blush blossomed in her cheeks. "Do you think if you were to look at my soul today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, all the way up until I'm so old that whenever it's cold my hip aches, that you would see me—the essence of who I am—every day?"

"I do." He lost himself in her eyes, as blue as the sky above the clouds, as clear as the air he longed to fly in, and there he found a way to say the words that redefined his understanding of life, that gave new purpose to each beat of his heart. "And it's a theory I'd like to be with you long enough to test out."

A smile uncurled across her lips. "Really?"

"Is that okay?"

She rolled her eyes at him, but her smile widened. "Yeah, I mean, I guess that's okay."

Then she edged forward on her seat, until her knees came to rest between his, and she cupped his face in both hands and drew him in for a heated kiss.

At the sound of the librarian clearing her throat behind them, they broke apart.

Elizabeth shot a glance over her shoulder, and then darted in for another peck. She whispered, "I love you too…you know, if that's okay."

* * *

Henry still believed in the eternal essence of the soul, that despite all the ways in which people grew and changed, there would always be a fragment of them that remained the same, but now as he watched Elizabeth's reflection in the glass—the way that it shimmered as the door swept open, as tangible yet untouchable as heat over desert sands; the way that her eyes had darkened, as though he had flown so high that he had broken through the firmament into the midnight skies above; the way that her image disappeared and succumbed to the shadows of the hall as the glass slid away—it felt as though, on that day, if he were to look for her soul, he would find that she'd buried it deep inside her, somewhere no one else could see it, not even him, somewhere safe from her pain.

And as she crossed over the brink between the room and the corridor, he couldn't help but think of that phrase that people always chimed at their kids: _Be careful of what you wish for_.

He had wanted her to come home, that was his wish.

But not like this.

* * *

**Thank you for your reviews! External validation is my oxygen.**


	24. Chapter Twenty-Two: beneath the patio

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

**…****beneath the patio.**

**Jay**

**Monday, 5th November, 2018**

**9:12 PM**

"Still no answer." Jay hung up his cell phone and slid it onto the dashboard. The metal casing grated against the plastic, and with its screen facing up, it caught the yellow glow of the street lamp—the shimmer was as soft as the nightlight that Chloe couldn't sleep without. He scrubbed his face, and then turned towards the _ta-rum, ta-rum, ta-rum_ of fingers drumming against the door panel on the passenger side. "Any chance we can push on without her?"

The beat slowed and then stopped.

"I don't know." Kat tugged her lips to one side. "I mean, I've been pushing back as hard as I can, but they're still insisting on quibbling over every single point, as though we haven't been over them, like, a thousand times already." She let out a huff of breath that fogged across the glass before it shrank in on itself and faded into nothingness. She glanced at Jay. "What about her husband? Have you tried calling him?"

Jay scrabbled for the phone with his fingertips, not bothering to lean forward in his seat. The phone slid down from the dash, and he caught it, and then scrolled through the list of recently dialled numbers—McCord, McCord, McCord, Jackson, McCord, McCord, Weston and Weston Family Law, Abby, McCord, McCord, McCord…

With the phone held next to his ear, the dial tone rang out and pulsed through the hush. He peered across the street. Beyond the row of three black SUVs, pallid light seeped out from the house, into the darkness, and mingled with the low-lying fog.

"Hi, this is—"

He hung up. "Just voicemail."

"Well, her detail are here—" Kat stared towards the house as well. "—so she must be in. Assuming she hasn't given them the slip…again."

"They might have gone to bed already. Which is just about where I want to be right now." Jay chucked the phone back on the dashboard and it skidded towards the windscreen. "Matt said she was exhausted, and she certainly looked it." _Amongst other things…_

"I can image. I mean, staying in a hospital non-stop for God knows how long, with all the light and noise and…sick people. It can't be good for you."

Jay stretched his arms up until his hands pressed against the brushed nylon of the ceiling, and he stifled a yawn. "Yelling at her brother probably didn't help either."

Kat gave a half-shrug, still staring out the window. "I'd yell at my brother too if he was in a coma. It's the kind of thing he'd do just to irritate me, you know, just so I'd have to pay attention to his mundane life. I actually think a coma might be an improvement, break up the monotony."

Jay picked up the manila folder from where it was wedged between the passenger seat and the handbrake. He rested it against the steering wheel, and flicked through the sheets, the text no more than haze on the page in the dim light. It ought to have been _Little Blue Truck_, or _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_, or _Where the Wild Things Are_. But it wasn't, and it wouldn't be until the secretary returned to work. And even then, if Abby—

He snapped the file shut again. "What about handing it off to Cushing?"

Kat spun to face him. "With the way he's been eyeing up her office? I don't think so."

She twisted around fully in the seat, so that her back rested against the car door, one leg folded in front of her. She held out one hand, palm facing up. "Best case scenario, things work out and he takes all the credit." She did the same with the opposite hand. "Worst case scenario, he completely guts the deal and we lose everything the secretary's fought for."

She weighed out the two. They both lost.

"I know I'm no longer the policy guy…but surely the worst case scenario is that they back out completely."

Kat looked upwards as she pondered the point, and then gave a mouth shrug. "True, but I don't think we're quite there yet. Then again—Russia. So you never can tell." She jerked her head towards the house. "The lights are still on. Maybe try calling the landline."

Jay leant forward and reached for the cell phone, the glass of the windshield frigid against the back of his hand. He dialled the number, but the line just rang and rang and rang. He hit cancel before it could go to answerphone. "Nothing."

Kat's gaze turned distant as though she were searching another realm that existed in the vicinity of the handbrake, then—in a flash of panic—her gaze sharpened and flicked up to meet Jay's eye. "Are we sure something hasn't happened?"

Jay drew his lips into a tight bud as he frowned. "Happened…as in digging up the garden late at night kind of happened?"

Kat pushed his arm. "To her brother, I mean." She gave a slight shake of her head, and her gaze turned vague again, contemplative. "No. Dr McCord doesn't really strike me as the bury-them-beneath-the-patio type."

"What makes you think I was talking about _Dr_ McCord?"

Kat's eyes brightened and she chuckled.

His own smile lingered for a moment, and then faded in time to the roar of the car that sailed past beyond the passenger side. "No. Her brother was stable last I heard, and they would've let us know if anything had changed."

"Things can go downhill pretty fast, though." She dipped her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a roll of fruit Life Savers, the paper and foil half frittered away. She offered one to Jay first, but he held up his hand and shook his head, and then she eased one out with the tip of her thumb—cherry—and popped it into her mouth. Her words lolled around the edge of the sweet as she spoke. "Take my uncle for example. Goes in with what he thinks is just a random rash, not causing him any problems or anything, but worth checking out. Three days later—dead."

"So, what was it?"

"Tick bite."

Jay paused, and then frowned. "He died from a tick bite?"

"No." Her gaze drifted away from his and she let out a long sigh, the scent of cherry laced with her breath. "He got hit by an ambulance on his way to the parking lot." She looked to Jay again. "But my point is, stuff happens, people die."

"Well, assuming there aren't too many rogue ambulances on the ICU, I'm going to stick with no news is good news. They're probably just screening my calls." He pressed redial and lifted the phone to his ear. He massaged his temples as the tone rang out and out and out.

"Still nothing." He slipped the phone into his coat pocket and then stared down at the folder. He tapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth in a string of clicks whilst he thought. He stopped. "What about stalling the Russians until she comes back?"

"That depends. Are we talking days or weeks?"

"Matt said she seemed okay when he left, in need of some rest and a few good meals, but nothing to worry about otherwise." He gave a small shrug. "And leaving the hospital has to be a good sign, right?"

"Well, I suppose I can try and keep it in a holding pattern, but at some point they're going to stop quibbling, and I don't know what move they'll make next." Kat's cell phone bleeped and she fished it out of her coat pocket. She scrolled down the screen. The glare lit the pinch in her brow as she spoke. "My concern is that the longer we leave it, the more leverage they'll think they have, and rumours are already circulating about the secretary, thanks to Senator Morejon. If they smell blood…" Her frown deepened, and she shook her head to herself and punched a message into the keypad. "I'm getting pressure from the White House to close the deal too." She glanced up at Jay, and the screen reflected as two white starbursts in her eyes. "You don't think _they'll_ tell us to hand it off to Cushing, do you?"

Jay propped his elbow against the door panel, and he ran his fingertips along the rubber trim that curved around the window. Flecks of drizzle dotted the windscreen, and they blurred the already milky citrine of the streetlights. "I think Russell Jackson will do whatever it takes to make Dalton look good, particularly when it comes to the Russians, and if that means removing the clauses that the secretary wants in favour of expediency…" _Or just removing the secretary…_

"Man…bad time to get poisoned." She tapped away at the keypad for a few more seconds, and then tucked the phone into the inside breast pocket of her coat and glanced over her shoulder towards the house. "If we could just get her input now, maybe get her to call to Avdonin, I think we could close the deal."

"Okay then." Jay proffered the folder.

She stared down at it, and then up at him. "Okay what?"

"Let's go talk to her."

She drew her chin in, and her eyes widened. "Is that really such a good idea? Turning up unannounced?"

Jay shrugged. "Well, we're already here, and there's no harm in asking, right?"

Kat looked at him as though she were trying to figure out if he was crazy in a good way or crazy in an about-to-go-on-a-rampage kind of way.

He flapped the folder at her. "The secretary or Cushing? Your choice."

Kat pursed her lips and paused for all of two seconds, and then snatched the file from his hand. "Fine." She twisted around in her seat, and grabbed hold of the door handle. "But if we end up gatecrashing a wake or late night 'gardening', I'm blaming you."

The car doors opened with a clunk that echoed out into the night. Jay flipped up the collar of his coat, and his shoulders hunched to his ears as drops of ice cold rain spotted the back of his neck. Kat huddled her own coat around her, the folder tucked beneath one arm, her hands buried in her pockets. They stood at the edge of the road and waited for the grey hatchback that had been parked several houses along to soar past, their reflections warped in its tinted rear windows.

A quick glance up and down the street, and then they hurried towards the SUVs and DS agents who guarded the other side. Each breath misted before them and sailed up to join the fog.

Of course, there were far worse things than wakes or late night 'gardening' that one could gatecrash. Things involving the two half-drunk glasses of Pinot Noir abandoned on the coffee table, one stained with a blush of coral pink lipstick; the popping and crackling of the fire with its light smouldering on the plush burgundy throw spread out in front of the hearth; and the strip of cobalt blue lace that hung from the frame of the small wooden bookshelf in the corner of the lounge. All of which he had only noticed halfway into detailing the developments in Sudan.

_He stopped. "It's Valentine's Day, isn't it?"_

_"__Kinda." The secretary bunched her shoulders to her ears._

_"__And that's not your shirt."_

_"__Nope." She popped the 'p'._

_"__So I'll just…" He pointed to the front door._

_She nodded. "Night, Jay."_

_"__Night, ma'am." With the flash of a sheepish smile, he grabbed up the file and his jacket, and hurried away from the lounge. But then he paused on the brink of the hallway. "Night, Henry."_

_"__Night, Jay." The shout came from the darkened pantry beyond the piano._

Jay pressed the button of the doorbell. A cringe clenched in his jaw even now at the thought of that night and the staff meeting the following morning—_Yes, I am aware of the overnight developments in Sudan_. Perhaps it ought to be heartening to know that, for some couples at least, love could last; perhaps if it weren't for everything cropping up again now with Abby, it would be.

The white gauze curtain that veiled the panes of glass in the front door lit up, and a shadowy figure drifted towards them through the hallway beyond. The chain scrabbled and scraped against its track, and then the door creaked opened and Stevie leant into the gap, one hand wrapped around the edge of the door, the other bracing her against the frame, her brow slightly pinched whilst she chewed on the inside of her bottom lip and studied Kat and Jay.

"Hey, Stevie." Kat smiled at her. "I like the dressing gown."

Stevie's frown vanished and she stared down at the flamingo pink kimono robe. "Thanks." She plucked at the edge of the silk, and it lifted, buoyed for a moment on the chill breeze, and then fluttered back to her side. "Mom got it on the Tokyo trip."

"Oh, right. I remember. That's why she wanted to go down Takeshita Dori." Kat glanced behind her, towards the agents who loitered further along the path, and then she leant in and cupped her hand to her mouth as though she and Stevie were co-conspirators. "DS were not happy."

Stevie gave a soft laugh, and a smile played on her lips. "I can imagine."

But just as fast as the light in her eyes had shone, it faded, and the look turned almost wistful. And then the smile fell away too, and her lips returned to their off-centred pout.

"So—" Kat rocked forward onto tiptoes and peered past Stevie into the hallway before she looked her in the eye again. "Is your mom in?"

Stevie crossed her arms over her chest, her fists tucked beneath her elbows, and she hugged the folds of dressing gown around her. "She's resting at the moment, you know what with the whole someone poisoning her and putting her in a coma _thing_."

A puff of cold air bristled up the back of Jay's neck, and thickened the ensuing silence.

An awkward laugh escaped him like a reflex response. He offered Stevie a strained smile, and as he gestured, his hands still stuffed into his pockets, the fronts of his coat flapped. "Look, I know it's late, but is there any chance we could speak to her?"

"Now's not a good time."

Jay paused, his mouth open. "Okay…well, do you think maybe you could ask her?"

Stevie stared back at him, her lips drawn into a bud, her eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

Jay pivoted to Kat—_Feel free to step in at any point_—and then back to Stevie. "We won't take long, no more than twenty minutes, half an hour."

"Did Russell Jackson send you?" The words came as sharp and as fast as a whip crack.

Jay reeled—"What?"—then shook his head vehemently. "No."

"Because he might think he knows everything, but he doesn't."

"Okay…"

"And he can't just go around making assumptions."

"We hear you."

"And if he thinks I'm going to—"

Kat stepped forward, one hand held up. "Stevie."

Stevie stopped, her mouth still open, her lips curved around the 'to'.

"Russell didn't send us."

Stevie's brow furrowed. She stared at Kat. "He didn't?"

Kat shook her head.

Stevie's arms fell from across her chest, and the drapes of pink silk caught the breeze again as another biting gust tumbled through.

Kat clutched the manila file in both hands in front of her—a peace offering, a shield. "We just want to talk to your mom about the deal over the BSR."

"Oh." Stevie's frown disappeared.

"So…" Jay offered her a tentative smile. "Can we come in?"

Stevie shrugged. "Sure." She pressed her back to the wall and swung the door open, and the full glare of the wall sconces flooded out onto the porch.

After Jay and Kat had stepped inside and onto the floral rug, Stevie pushed the door to with a soft click. "But she really is meant to be resting, and I'm not sure if she's up to any visitors right now. Just wait here a moment and I'll check with my dad."

She strode away through the entrance hall and across the living room; her bare feet thumped off the mahogany floorboards, and the flamingo pink robe that the secretary had coaxed DS agents into defying protocol for billowed after her.

When she had disappeared into the dim glow that steeped the dining room, Kat muttered, "Forget Dr McCord and the secretary, I think Stevie might be the one with the shovel."

"Well, if Russell Jackson ever goes missing…"

"That would be one long list of suspects."

While they waited, Kat perused the ornaments and trinkets arranged on the glass-topped console table before she opened up one of the magazines that lay in the wooden tray at its middle and flicked through the pages. When she stopped and studied the text of an article, Jay turned away and sauntered towards the study. He raised his hand to his brow, shielding his eyes, and peered through the darkened glass into the stillness of the room. Both laptops were closed and centred on top of the desks, the paperwork was stacked and aligned with the edges of the wood, and every last spine on the bookshelves was pressed flush to its neighbours; only the secretary's office chair, turned at an angle, disrupted the geometry of the scene. And something about it, that slight imbalance, was enough to release a trickle of unease.

"Hey there, guys."

Jay straightened up as Dr McCord's voice reached out across the lounge.

Kat placed the magazine down, and her face lit up. "Hey, Dr McCord."

"Sorry to keep you waiting." He offered them a smile that stopped long before his eyes, and then gestured towards the faded plum couch. "Take a seat."

With the warmth of the room starting to prickle after the crisp air outside, Jay shrugged off his overcoat and folded it into his lap as he sank down onto the cushions. Kat took a seat next to him, whilst Dr McCord pulled up one of the armchairs opposite.

"Sorry we missed your calls. Things have been…busy since we got back from the hospital."

"How's Dr Adams doing?" Kat rested the manila file in her lap and wrestled off her coat. She draped its folds of black wool over the cushions behind her. "We're all thinking of him."

"He's stable."

"And the secretary?"

"She's…" Dr McCord's gaze drifted towards the staircase. His eyebrows raised. "…tired."

"Yeah, Stevie said she was resting."

Dr McCord tugged at his mouth and then let his hand fall back to the armrest. He bounced his fingertips against the deep mahogany, and focused his gaze on the movements. "She didn't get much sleep on the ward, and it'll take her a few days to get back into a regular pattern." His hand stilled, and he looked up at them. One corner of his lips twitched in the most meagre of smiles. "You know what hospitals are like."

"Sure." Kat nodded. "I was saying to Jay, nothing but lights and noise and sick people."

Jay studied Dr McCord's expression with a slight frown. "Is she getting any sleep?"

"Here and there."

"You know what might help?" Kat pivoted from Dr McCord to Jay and then back again. "Sunlight."

Jay stared at her—_Sunlight? Seriously? You're recommending sunlight?_

She continued, "Yeah. When I used to spend all day indoors cramming for exams I'd get the worst insomnia ever, I mean, the kind that makes you stare up at the ceiling and want to gouge your eyes out just so you don't have to look at the plaster anymore, but then I heard this thing about getting sunlight first thing in the morning, and it worked wonders. Something to do with setting the body clock."

Dr McCord gave a slow now. "Thanks… I'll bear that in mind."

Kat pointed one finger at him, and her eyebrows arched. "Or there's always melatonin supplements, if you're into that kind of thing."

Dr McCord watched Kat for a second with a kind of wary bemusement, and then pivoted his gaze to Jay. "Stevie said you need to speak to Elizabeth about a work issue."

"It's the BSR deal she was working on before the…" Jay halted. He floundered. What was the diplomatic term for 'botched assassination attempt'? "…Before." He cleared his throat. "We just wanted to update her on what's been happening and get some advice on how to proceed. I understand that she's resting, it's just that she's invested a lot in making this deal happen, and we feel that her input at this point could help close the deal."

Dr McCord studied Jay with a frown. "Can't it wait a few days?"

Kat leant forward in her seat. "The thing is, the negotiations have come to a standstill."

Jay stooped forward as well, his elbows propped on top of the coat in his lap. "And if we stall too long, the deal might collapse completely."

Kat glanced to Jay, and then back to Dr McCord. "But if we hand it off to Deputy Secretary Cushing, then he'll most likely take out all the clauses that the secretary fought for."

"And if things start to go south, the White House will tell us to hand it off to Cushing anyway."

"But by that point we'll have lost pretty much any leverage we have."

Dr McCord held up one hand and shook his head slightly. "But can't it wait a few days?"

Kat pursed her lips, and then shrugged. "We don't know."

Dr McCord rubbed the two-day stubble that darkened the line of his jaw. "Look, I think it's best if you come back another time, once she's had some rest. It's been a long day, and I'm not sure what talking to her now will achieve."

"Honestly, at this point, any input would be useful."

"Then, how about you leave the file with me?" Dr McCord beckoned for the manila folder that rested in Kat's lap. "Elizabeth can look it over, and if she has any thoughts, she can give you a call tomorrow."

Kat wrapped her fingers over the edge of the file. "It's just, it might be better if we explain the situation fully to her first."

Dr McCord shook his head. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"Why not?" Kat's voice shot up.

"Kat." Jay warned, and he held out one hand and signalled for her to back down. He studied Dr McCord: the clench in his jaw, the tension that gripped his shoulders, the concern that simmered just beneath the surface of his eyes. His own stomach tightened. "Henry…is everything okay?"

Dr McCord held Jay's gaze, and seconds stretched into hours.

"Ahem." Stevie cleared her throat as she stood in the doorway between the lounge and the dining room. She flashed Jay and Kat a taut smile. "Sorry to interrupt." Her gaze turned to Dr McCord. "Dad, a word?" She jerked her head towards the shadows behind her.

Dr McCord rose from his chair, turned his back on Kat and Jay, and padded across the floor towards to his daughter. He squeezed her upper arm, and dipped down, trying to catch her gaze. "Everything all right?"

Stevie looked down at the floor. She hugged her dressing gown around her and shifted from one foot to the other, and then finally she glanced up and met her father's eye. She winced. "So, Mom spy-crafted me into telling her that Kat and Jay are here, and she asked me to tell you that she respectfully requests that you stop mollycoddling her and—" She paused to stare at the palm of her hand, and then continued reading from it. "—and that you stop detaining her staff, and she'd very much appreciate it if you would be so kind as to send them through immediately." She lowered her hand again. "She also asked me _not_ to tell you that she's making another pot of coffee—" She bunched her lips to one side and gave a small shrug. "—but I thought you should know."

Dr McCord massaged his temples. "Anything else?"

A faint blush rose in Stevie's cheeks, the exact shade of her gown. "There was some other stuff that I really didn't want to hear and that I'm definitely not going to repeat and that I'm going to work on repressing immediately." She turned away, took a step back into the dining room, and then stopped. "Oh, and she's pissed at you for thinking that you could hide this from her."

"Yeah—" Dr McCord tugged at his mouth and shook his head to himself. "I sense that."

Kat leant towards Jay, hid her mouth behind one hand and muttered, "What's going on?"

"I'm not quite sure, but I don't like the sound of it."

When Dr McCord beckoned them over, they both eased up from the couch. Jay dropped his coat onto the cushions behind him, and then he and Kat joined Dr McCord in the doorway.

Dr McCord pivoted towards the kitchen and then back to face them. "Look, the doctors told Elizabeth that they're not going to do anything more to try and wake her brother up, and it's come as a bit of a shock. So, please…just be patient with her."

Kat's brow furrowed. "So, do they not think he'll wake up?"

"They still don't know. But Elizabeth…" Dr McCord ran one hand through his hair and then clung to the back of his neck. He let out a sharp breath, and then looked to them again. "She's still processing." His lips tugged into a sorry smile. "Just be patient with her…and try not to engage."

They followed Dr McCord through the shadows of the dining room and towards the off-white glow of the kitchen. Kat muttered to Jay, "Engage with what?"

The secretary stood at the kitchen counter; her fingers peeked out from the sleeves of her faded grey sweatshirt and drummed against the marble top. When the coffee machine clicked off, she grabbed the handle of the pot and poured the steaming liquid into a large mug that rested on the side; the strap of her watch slipped down her wrist as she did so, and the recessed lights hidden beneath the cabinets glinted off the glass that covered its face.

"Good evening, ma'am." Jay flashed her a smile so broad that it ached.

She shot them a sideways glance. "Evening." And then she returned her attention to the coffee. When the mug was three-quarters of the way full, she clunked the pot back down into the base and then carried the mug over to the kitchen island and topped it up with the water from the filter jug until the licks of steam that rolled off the surface died away.

"You look…" Jay began, but his smile withered and he trailed off. A SVTC call to Russia from her right now would probably sink the deal faster than Cushing ever could, not to mention her career, or his hopes of ever returning to a normal work-life balance—though at least one half of that equation felt as though it was already disintegrating.

She leant back against the side and cradled the coffee cup to her chest, her fingers interlocked beneath the arch of the handle. "Don't worry, Jay, Henry has a long list of adjectives to help you finish that sentence, but I advise you bear it in mind that I can't fire him."

Her gaze darted to her husband where he stood in front of the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest.

But he simply stared back at her and said nothing.

"So…" Kat gave a smile that was a touch too bright. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine." The secretary took a long sip of the coffee. "Just tired."

Kat eyed the mug. "Maybe you should cut back on the caffeine. It's gone nine o'clock."

The secretary took another sip and met Kat's eye over the brim. She swallowed. "Nine o'clock, huh? Then maybe I should fill this mug with Scotch instead."

"Uh…" Kat froze and then sent Jay a panicked look, or perhaps just mirrored his own expression back at him.

"Elizabeth." Dr McCord pinched the bridge of his nose.

She set the mug down on the counter behind her. The knock of ceramic against marble echoed out across the kitchen. She crossed her arms over her chest, causing her sweatshirt to deflate like a flag losing the wind and falling back against its mast, and she trained her glare on her husband. "Tell me, why is it that I have to interrogate my own daughter just to find out what's going on in my own house?"

Dr McCord clenched his jaw. When he spoke, his tone strained, as though he were fighting to keep it level. "_Our_ daughter and _our_ house. And you shouldn't be interrogating her."

The secretary flung her hands up and pushed herself away from the side. "Well, I wouldn't have to interrogate her if you stopped treating me like a child."

"I'm not treating you—"

"What did you plan to do? Hmm? Just send my staff away and not tell me?" She stepped up to the island and wrapped her fingers around the edge of the marble. "Or did you think you could make State decisions for me too?"

"I'm not making decisions for you." Dr McCord stepped up to the opposite side of the island and rested his hands against the top, his palms flat to the surface. "I just wanted you to get some rest. Then you could have called into work in the morning, when you were feeling less…"

"Less what?"

"Less…" His shoulders rose and he sought an answer from the glass-paned cabinets that lined the walls behind her.

"Think faster, Henry. What adjective comes next? Angry? Crazy? Delusional?"

"Tired." His gaze returned to her, and his shoulders slumped. "Less tired."

"Right." She gave a curt nod. "Tired."

"You need sleep. People need sleep."

She bit down on the inside of her mouth, and carved out a hollow beneath her cheekbone. "If I go to sleep, will Will wake up?"

He shrank back, as though stung.

"Because that's what I need, Henry. I need to stop feeling dread every time the phone rings because I think it's someone calling to tell me he's died. I need to stop seeing him in…" She took a sharp breath. "…seeing him on that ward every time I close my eyes. I need to stop hearing people telling me that everything's going to be okay, because this is a bottomless pit of not freaking all right." She lowered her gaze to the counter, and her throat bobbed as she swallowed. "I need my brother back."

"I know." He grazed her fingertips where they curled over the edge of the marble.

She snatched her hand away. "So, just stop telling me what I need."

"Okay."

"Okay?" Her brow pinched as she met his eye.

"Okay." He nodded. He motioned to Kat and Jay. "I'll leave you to it." He stepped around the edge of the island, paused, and then turned to face her. "But if you need _me_, just shout."

The pad of his socks against the floorboards faded away through the dining room.

The secretary propped her elbows against the countertop, stooped forward, and pressed her eyes to the heels of her palms. She shook her head to herself and then slid her hands around to her temples and massaged broad circles there. A fading ripple of the woman who had swathed herself in her husband's shirt and slacks on Valentine's night.

Kat shot Jay an anxious look, and then eased a step closer to the secretary. "Ma'am…?"

The secretary spoke in a flat voice. "You think I'm a bitch for treating him like that. And you're right, I am a bitch…" She straightened up and grabbed her mug of coffee from the counter behind her. "…but right now being angry is easier than feeling all this other crap."

She drifted towards the table in the den. The cuffs of her red tartan pyjama bottoms scuffed around her bare feet.

Jay shared a look with Kat—_Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all_—and then he trailed after the secretary. "We don't think that, ma'am."

She sank down into the chair on the opposite side of the table, nearest the bookshelf, and her whole body slumped as though the walk from the kitchen had been not just a few metres, but a trek to the summit of Machu Picchu in the height of a Peruvian summer. "Well, you should. Because I am." She held out her hand for the manila file that Kat still clutched in front of her. "And I know I don't deserve him."

Jay and Kat lowered themselves into their own seats.

The secretary snapped open the spectacles case that sat in the middle of the table, and then swapped her glasses over. She pushed the reading glasses up the bridge of her nose with the tip of her middle finger, and then stared down at the closed file in front of her and twisted her wedding ring around and around and around. The band slipped with ease between her joints. She murmured, "How can I deserve someone who keeps his promises when I can't keep mine?"

"Are you sure you're okay to do this now?" Jay tapped his fingers on top of the file, ready to drag it away. "Maybe it's best if we—"

She shook her head. "I'm fine." She pushed her wedding band as close to her knuckle as it would go, and then shooed Jay's hand aside and opened up the file. "Just processing."

She dragged a fingertip over the notes as she scanned down the first page, and then she lifted the edge and curled it over to cast an eye at the text on the reverse before she let it flutter back down. She looked up at Kat. "So, what exactly am I looking at?"

With her hands clutched in her lap, Kat leant in towards the table. "The deal that we agreed over the BSR… Well, since you've been away from the office, it's come to a halt."

"Why?" The secretary frowned down at the page.

"Russia, of course." Kat shook her head to herself, and her jaw tightened. She added in a mutter, "It's always the Russians."

Jay propped his elbows atop the table, and his hands made vague motions. "Kat's been trying to push back, but they just won't budge."

"I think they're holding out for a softer deal."

The secretary continued to stare down at the text.

Jay nodded at Kat, and then looked back to the secretary. "But we don't want to make any amendments, especially when they're just trying to take advantage of the current situation."

"We thought maybe a call to Minister Avdonin from you would help." Kat sent the secretary a half-hopeful, half-pleading look.

But the secretary just continued to stare down at the text.

"Of course—" Jay shifted in his seat at the head of the table and twisted around so that he faced the secretary and acted as a buffer between her and Kat. "—there's no rush. We can schedule it for whenever you're ready…and we'd need time to brief you properly first anyway."

Kat's optimistic look persisted. "So, what do you say?"

The secretary continued to stare down at the text.

The silence stretched.

"Ma'am…?"

The secretary's gaze bored through the page.

Through space.

Through time?

And the trickle of unease that had been drip, drip, dripping through Jay's veins ever since he had peered into the study and seen the secretary's chair aslant amidst the parallel lines and symmetry swelled and then surged over into a flood.

He swivelled around in his seat, towards the kitchen and the dining room beyond. "Henry." His shout bounced off the walls and shook through the ground floor of the house.

Kat leant across the table and waved her hand in front of the secretary's eyes. "Ma'am?"

When the secretary didn't so much as blink, Kat looked to Jay with a nick at the centre of her brow. "What is this? Is she having some kind of absence seizure?" The pinch furrowed into a worried frown. "You don't think she's still having effects from the poison, do you?"

Was it bad that the first thought that sprang to his mind was '_I hope so_'? Did it make him selfish that in that moment he prayed that the glaze that rendered the secretary's eyes as lifeless as those of one of Chloe's dolls was just a product of poison lingering in her brain? Or was the true sin that if someone told him he was just overreacting and that his assumption was utterly unfounded, that he would want to believe them, that he would try his best to set light to those doubts that skulked like shadows through his thoughts? Doubts as dark as the words of Russell Jackson's last phone call. _If she's struggling, any sign at all, you will tell me… Somebody needs to take care of it._

Footsteps pounded through the house.

"What is it?" Dr McCord strode through the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. His gaze fell to his wife, and he halted. "Elizabeth?"

The secretary blinked. "Yeah?" Her gaze zig-zagged across the room before it anchored on her husband. She pulled her reading glasses off and dropped them onto the table. The plastic frames clattered against the wood. She massaged away the impressions they had left on the bridge of her nose. "Do you remember when you took me camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, back when we were still dating, and we watched the fireflies?"

"Of course." He padded across the rug and then crouched down at her side.

Jay eased up from his chair, and motioned for Kat to join him as he tiptoed towards the wooden stool snugged against the end of the kitchen island, giving the couple space.

"I was thinking…" Her finger and thumb stilled. "…it was really beautiful that night."

"It was." Her husband squeezed her knee.

She lowered her hand to the table and worried the edge of the file. "Henry?"

"Yes?"

She turned and looked down at him, and then she winced. "I really need some sleep."

He nodded and offered her a small smile. "Okay."

And as Dr McCord took hold of his wife's hand, and led her up the stairs, perhaps the torrent of unease that coursed through Jay ought to have settled—he willed it to settle—but instead it stirred deeper within his veins, because bodies weren't the only thing that people buried beneath the patio, and in all honesty, they should be the least of a person's concerns. No, it was the other things that people paved over that they ought to fear. Because pain, memories, truth…

They had a way of sneaking through the cracks.

* * *

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	25. Chapter Twenty-Three: betrayal or loy

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

**…****betrayal or loyalty.**

**Jay**

**Tuesday, 6th November, 2018**

**9:09 AM**

"Something's wrong." Jay swivelled back and forth in his chair at the head of the table in the conference room. The grey murk that lurked outside the windows and that seeped its way through the gauze curtains battled with the white light from the wall sconces.

"This is State." Matt leant across the desk and grabbed one of the scones from the plate in the middle of the table. "If there weren't something wrong, we'd all be out of a job."

Jay shot him a look. "I meant with the secretary."

"Why? What did her husband say?" Kat dusted chocolate chip cookie crumbs from her fingertips and onto the paper napkin spread across the open file in front of her.

Jay's shoulders rose with his breath, and then, with a stream of a sigh, his whole body deflated. "That she's grieving." He shook his head to himself, leant forward and propped his elbows against the desk. He made vague gestures as he spoke, and passed a ballpoint pen back and forth between his hands. "Something about her not having a chance to grieve for her parents when she was younger because she had to look after her brother, so now she's grieving for all of them."

Kat shrugged. "Makes sense."

"Nothing wrong with that." Daisy slipped through the gap between her and Kat's chairs and sank down into her seat. She clutched her freshly refilled coffee mug to her chest in one hand, whilst the other hand grabbed for her tablet and then balanced it in her lap.

"But she didn't seem…" Jay fumbled for the word. "…_right_."

"She seemed tired and over-caffeinated, and yeah—" Kat gave a mouth shrug. "—a bit bitchy with her husband, but it looked like they made up."

Jay stared at her. _Tired? Over-caffeinated? A bit bitchy?_ "She was volatile and irritable and spacing out."

Matt slathered his scone with two single-serve packs of butter, and the rich aroma rose up to mingle with the heady bloom of coffee. "Sounds like you when you haven't slept in a week."

"I'm serious."

Matt glanced up. "So am I."

Jay pivoted his seat around so that his back was to Matt, and he addressed Kat and Daisy instead. "I think we should go to Russell Jackson."

Kat frowned at him as though he had just announced his plans to back Carlos Morejon for the presidency. "What? Why?"

"Because I think she's struggling and I don't think she's currently able to fulfil her role as secretary of state."

"Look," Matt said, "if you're fed up of having to work late, just say so and let the rest of us pitch in and help."

"It's not about me, it's about what's right for the department, for the country."

"You make betrayal sound so noble."

Jay pivoted back to face him. "Betrayal? How's that betrayal?"

Daisy continued to scroll down the screen of her tablet. "Going to Russell Jackson behind her back and having her ousted from her job…?" She arched her eyebrows. "Doesn't exactly smack of loyalty."

"Ironic—" Blake piped up from the desk in the corner. "—given that your loyalty was the reason why she appointed you as her chief of staff."

Jay swept their accusations aside. "It's not about betrayal or loyalty, it's about doing what's right."

Matt pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "What does Dr McCord think?"

"He thinks she's just tired and needs some rest."

Daisy's fingers flared from the curve of her coffee mug, and her fuchsia nail polish caught a glimmer of the light. "There you go, then. He would know if something was wrong."

Jay shook his head to himself. "Maybe he just doesn't see it, doesn't want to see it."

The three of them sent him skeptical looks, enough to make him question whether he was the one not seeing clearly, whilst Blake's stare burned at the back of his neck.

"Look—" He shot a quick glance towards the walnut doors, which were slid shut and muffled the trills of telephones beyond, and then he lowered his voice and leant closer to the desk. "She witnesses her brother nearly dying right in front of her, she has to fight to save his life, she then nearly dies herself, only to wake up find out that he might not survive. That's a total head-scrambler for anyone, but especially for someone with…problems."

"You make it sound like she's an alcoholic." Matt deadpanned.

"Wait." Kat's brow furrowed, and her gaze darted to each person in turn. "The secretary has an alcohol problem?"

"No," Matt said quickly.

Kat stared at Jay, and she spoke in a low voice, her lips barely moving. "Is that what that Scotch thing was about?"

Jay waved his hand and shook his head. "The secretary's not an alcoholic."

Daisy looked up from her tablet, her eyes wide. "What Scotch thing?"

"It's nothing."

"Because if she's drinking—" Daisy's nostrils flared.

"The only thing she's drinking is coffee. Lots of coffee."

"Then what problems are you talking about?" When no one replied, Kat eyed each of them, and the furrow in her brow deepened. "Seriously, guys. What problems?"

Jay's chest swelled with his breath. The jumble of letters spilled out. "PTSD."

Her mouth fell open. "The secretary has PTSD?"

"Had." Matt raised one finger to highlight the error. "—ish."

Jay frowned at him. "There's no past tense to PTSD and there was nothing -ish about it."

"I'm sorry." Kat shook her head as though dazed. "How did I not know about this?"

Daisy bunched her lips to one side as she continued to tap at her tablet. "Because nobody talks about it."

"Especially not the secretary." Matt sank his teeth into his scone.

"Or her husband," Jay added.

"They talk about it to me." Blake's voice came from the corner.

"But she seems so…" Kat's fingers writhed as she grasped for the word. "…_together_."

"That's because she is together." Matt's words were muffled by his mouthful.

Jay took a swig of his coffee, tepid and bitter, and then swallowed with a grimace. He clunked the mug back to the desk. "Most of the time."

Daisy laid her tablet flat in her lap and looked to Kat. "She has some issues surrounding what happened in Iran, but it doesn't define her."

Jay raised his eyebrows. "Issues? Seriously?" He flung one hand towards the side door to the secretary's office. "She went nuclear on Minister Chen."

Daisy pointed her index finger at Jay. The whites of her eyes reflected the light from the sconces behind him. "That happened one time."

Matt shot him a sideways look. "I think you'd have issues too if you almost got blown up."

"Man—" Kat sighed out the word, and her gaze turned pensive. "Cable really doesn't give you the good stuff."

"Can we just get back to the point?" Jay glanced around at them. His gaze lingered for no more than half a second on each.

"What was your point?" Matt grasped for another napkin.

"The secretary, and what we're going to do about what's going on."

Matt wiped the butter from his fingers, and then scrunched up the napkin and launched it towards the bin next to Blake's desk in the corner. When it missed, he eased up from his seat and stooped down to retrieve it. "Nothing's going on until she says it's going on."

Jay rocked back in his chair and tossed his hands up. "That's what everybody said last time."

Daisy placed her tablet down on the desk, and then cradled her coffee cup in both hands. Her fingers fluttered beneath the handle. "You've got to give her space to grieve."

The corner of Jay's lips tweaked, and he gave a slight shake of the head. "It's not the grieving I'm worried about. It's the spacing out."

Daisy's eyes widened a fraction, a glimmer of fear. "You think she's having flashbacks?"

"I don't know." Jay folded his hands behind his head and pivoted back and forth in his seat. He gave a half-shrug. "Maybe."

"What?" Kat swung around to glance at Daisy, and then returned to Jay and cocked a finger at him. "Oh… You mean when she started talking to her husband about some memory about fireflies?"

Matt flattened his palms to the desk and leant into them, and his gaze swept around the table, his eyes alight with his smirk. "Memories about fireflies? Now that's what you call a flashback." He sank into his seat.

Kat tried to hide her chuckle behind her fist, whilst Daisy bit down on her lower lip to stop her smile from unfurling.

Jay pulled a face at Matt. "Very funny. But I'm trying to have a serious conversation here."

Kat shook off the rest of her laughter. "She didn't seem distressed at all, just exhausted. It could have been a microsleep, or some kind of lapse caused by sleep deprivation and too much caffeine…or maybe she's just a bit _seizurey_ after the poison."

Jay glared at her. "_Seizurey_ isn't even a word."

Matt rocked forward onto his elbows. "But it should be."

Daisy looked to Jay. Her smile still lingered at the corner of her lips and danced in her eyes. "Did you ask Dr McCord?"

Jay gave a curt nod. "I brought it up."

"And?"

"And…" His gaze drifted, and then he pinched his eyes shut. "He said she doesn't remember anything, couldn't even assist the FBI." His hand fell back to the desk.

Daisy shrugged. "There you go then."

"Look." Matt's tone sobered. "I know that you wanted her to be back at the office already, but you just need to give her a little time. I can go visit her again if you want."

"What?" Jay let out a low snort. "Because you're the secretary whisperer now?"

Matt's lips drew into a tight pout. "No, because I'm willing to sit there and listen to her, rather than judging her and trying to stick some label on her. And you know what, even if she is struggling, she'll still get through it. You just have to be patient."

The corners of Jay's mouth tugged into a grim line. "Some things people don't recover from, in which case we're doing no one any favours by dragging this out."

"Hey." Matt scowled at him. "People can recover from anything if they have the right support, but you acting all judgmental and wanting to cut the cord and go straight to Russell Jackson isn't going to help."

Jay's tone sharpened. "Neither is pretending that everything's all right."

"Okay—" Matt held up one hand. "—let's assume for a minute that something is wrong. Dr McCord said to me that work helps her get through rough patches, and I saw how it calmed her down when she was on the ward, so how about you don't go around trying to take her job from her right when she needs it the most."

Jay clutched his forehead. "But she's not doing her job. She's drinking coffee, refusing to sleep and yelling at her husband."

"She said she wanted to sleep last night," Kat said.

"Yes, but—"

"And people get angry when they're grieving."

The phone trilled in the corner, and the sound of plastic rocking against plastic clunked out.

"True, but—"

"And coffee has got to beat a mugful of Scotch."

"I agree, but—"

"Jay?" Blake cut in.

Jay whirled around, and met Blake with a lour. "What?"

Blake quirked an eyebrow at him—not impressed. He gestured to the phone. "That was Dr McCord calling on behalf of the secretary. She said she'd like you to schedule a call with Minister Avdonin for next week."

Matt looked at him over the rim of his glasses. The coffee mug that he held to his lips didn't even begin to conceal his smirk. "Still want to go to Russell Jackson?"

Jay swivelled away from them, clicked his tongue and shook his head to himself. He stared towards the door to the secretary's office nestled in the alcove in the corner. They could argue the point all day, trawl through WebMD or dig out the DSM if that's what it took. But if the secretary was so 'fine', then why wasn't she calling for herself?

* * *

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	26. Chapter Twenty-Four: thinking about s

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

**…****thinking about shoes.**

**Stevie**

**Thursday, 8th November, 2018**

**11:51 am**

"I don't know whose clock you're going by, but by my reckoning your lunch break doesn't start for nine more minutes."

Stevie stopped, her arms halfway into the sleeves of her trench coat. She turned around to face Adele, wriggled the coat the rest of the way up, and then freed the end of her ponytail from inside the collar. "Please can I leave early, just this once?"

Adele joggled together the sheets of paper atop the opened pages of the binder and fastened them with a pale blue paperclip. She shook her head to herself. "You were twenty minutes late this morning as well."

Stevie took a step closer to Adele's desk. She shot a glance towards the closed office door behind her, and lowered her voice. "Only because Russell called to tell me to pick up doughnuts and there was a massive queue at the bakery, and then they had run out of those pink ones with sprinkles, which you totally know are his favourite, so I had to stand around and wait for them to bring out the next batch."

Adele folded her arms on top of the file, and she stared up at Stevie. "That still doesn't mean you get to disappear early now."

Stevie let her head fall back and she gave an inward groan. She looked to Adele again. "It's just my dad had to go into work today and I promised him I'd stop by to check on my mom, and if I don't leave now I won't have time to make it there and back before the meeting this afternoon, and then Russell will get mad, but I can't let my dad down. So please—" She clasped her hands together. "—just this once?"

The distant trill of a telephone lilted through the corridor, buoyed on the wave of staffers who surged past the open door in a blur of charcoals, blacks and navy blues.

Adele's voice softened. "How is your mom?"

Stevie shrank away from the desk and straightened up, her shoulders rolled back, her spine rigid. Her lips tensed and she gave a quick nod. "Good."

"I'm not Russell."

Another nod. "I know."

Adele gave her a look.

Stevie's body relaxed, as though the ropes affixed to sole and crown had slackened. She flashed a broad smile, a new set of ropes tugging at the corners of her lips instead. "Really, she's fine. She's been catching up on work, her appetite's back…"

Adele's look wavered a little, yielding, before she shooed the rest of it away with a shake of her head. "And your uncle?"

"The same." Stevie clasped her hands together again. "So, please can I go? Please?"

Adele eyed her for one long moment, a moment that felt as though it were a cord of Blu-Tack that stretched and thinned until its middle sagged, then—"Fine." The word escaped in a sharp sigh. She pointed one finger at Stevie. "But you'd better not be late back."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you." Stevie snatched up her handbag from where it slouched on her office chair, slung the straps over her shoulder, and dashed towards the door. Her high heels wobbled slightly underfoot.

"Stevie."

She halted, and with one hand steadying her against the door frame, she turned back.

Adele's gaze drifted towards the office door opposite, and then she met Stevie's eye once more and leant in. "Whatever you might think, Russell's not a bad guy."

Stevie hoisted the straps of her handbag further up her shoulder, and she nodded, a little too briskly. "I know."

"I'll admit that he has nothing but contempt for a lot of people—"

Stevie resisted a snort.

"—but I know that he respects your mother."

This time the snort escaped her. "Is that why he asked me to spy on her?"

Adele pursed her lips, as though she were a lawyer receiving undisclosed (and incriminating) evidence regarding her client in the middle of a court session, forcing her to wrack her mind for a plausible explanation, any plausible explanation. Within half a second, her facade fell back into place and she opened her mouth to speak again.

But Stevie tilted her head towards the door that led onto the corridor. "Look, I've gotta go. After all, I don't want to be late back."

* * *

**12:41 pm**

"Mom?"

Silence ached through the house.

Stevie eased the front door into its frame with a soft click, and then let the straps of her handbag slide down from her shoulder until the pink paisley canvas dropped and crumpled at the foot of the console table.

"Mom…it's me."

Nothing, just the sound of a car sweeping past on the dampened street.

"Mom…are you in?"

Nothing.

Maybe she'd gone out.

Stevie prised away the edge of the gauze curtain that stretched in rucks across the window panes of the front door, and she peeked through the slit into the grey drizzle that hazed beyond the canopy of the porch. Fleet of SUVs—check. Squadron of DS guys—check.

So, she must be in.

Stevie let the gauze slip from her fingertips and ping back into place, and then she nudged off her shoes and kicked them beneath the console table. They thudded against the wall and toppled onto the floorboards with a thunk.

"Mom?"

Nothing.

Then again, maybe she'd snuck out without anyone knowing; it wouldn't be the first time. Though normally she'd have an accomplice, and no one else was home. No, she must be in.

Stevie padded across the lounge and into the dining room; her toes gripped at the cool wood as they slipped against it through the nylon of her tights. The smell of burnt toast hung over the kitchen, faint at first like wisps of smoke, but it grew thicker and thicker until the scent stung in her nose.

"Mom…are you here?"

Nothing, just the _plink, plink, plink_ of water dripping from the tap and into the cup she had abandoned in the sink that morning. A water clock for a silence so stagnant it felt as though time had stopped.

Maybe she'd fallen asleep. Maybe she was just taking a nap. God knew she needed the rest.

Stevie tiptoed between the parallel lines of the marble countertop and the kitchen island. She passed the pot of coffee that nestled in the base of the coffee maker, its glass orb filled to the top, the contents too cold to release anything other than the ghost of an aroma. She passed the sink and the _plink, plink, plink_ of its water clock, the window behind spittled with raindrops. She passed the toaster with the two slices of farmhouse white that peeked out, their crusts golden, their sides a gradation of copper to coal black.

"Mom?"

At the flash from the bookcase at the far end of the room, her head jerked up. The glass frame that cased the photograph of her mother and Uncle Will caught the glare from the television screen. Though, like everything else in the house, the images came without a sound.

"Mom…are you in here?"

Nothing, just the whisper of her own pulse threading through her bloodstream.

_She's fine, she's just working. She's fine, she just forgot about the coffee and the toast. She's fine, you're just overreacting. She's fine, Russell just freaked you out and now you're assuming that something's wrong. And you know what they say when you assume…_

"You make an ass out of you and me." Her lips mumbled over the words.

She rounded the corner into the living room.

Her toes skidded on the carpet as she stopped.

"Mom…? Mom…?"

Nothing.

The whisper of her pulse surged into a roar.

She hurried around the end of couch, swept aside the State Department documents that fanned across the footstool, and sank down. She perched right at the edge of the cushion.

Her mother stared through her. Her eyes were glassy and they reflected the grey-white light from the television screen as she sat hunched forward on the sofa, her reading glasses dangling from the plastic arm pinched between the forefinger and thumb of one hand. She hadn't changed out of the indigo plaid pyjama bottoms and Red Hot Chilli Peppers tee that she had been wearing that morning, and she sat so still that it looked as though the silence of the house had permeated her muscles, her mind, her bones.

"Mom?" Stevie touched her mother's knee. "Mom?"

Nothing.

"Mom?" Her fingers trembled as she shook her mother's knee. "Mom?"

Her mother jolted, and the glasses slipped from her hand and bounced off the carpet. Her gaze reeled around the room before it landed on Stevie. "Hmm?"

"What are you doing?"

She stooped down and picked up the glasses. "Thinking."

"About work?" _Please say work._

"No." She sank back until the cushions behind enveloped her, and then she let out a long stream of breath, as though in all that stillness she had forgotten to breathe. "About shoes."

Stevie's brow furrowed and her hand retreated to her lap. "Shoes?"

"Shoes." With her head rested against the back of the couch, her mother stared up beyond the ceiling. "You know when you see a lost shoe, not a pair, just one shoe lying in the grass in the park or abandoned by the side of the road."

Stevie shrank back, and hugged her arms over her chest. "Um…I guess."

"But how does anyone lose just one shoe?" Her mother's hands drifted through their vague gestures. "I mean, you're walking around in a pair and suddenly you only have one. Surely you'd notice that. Maybe if you lost both shoes then after a while you'd forget you ever had them at all, but if you lost just one and kept going with the other…" Her hands stopped, and she shook her head to herself. "How can you not realise? How can you miss that?"

Stevie forced a shrug. "I…I don't know." She sought the room for an answer. "Maybe they were drunk, or maybe they were just carrying them at the time, or maybe they were in a hurry or something. I don't know."

Her mother nodded. "Maybe."

Stevie chewed on the inside of her cheek. "Mom?"

"Hmm?" Her mother massaged the bridge of her nose.

"Is…is everything okay?"

Her hand stilled. "Fine."

"Are you sure?"

She blinked her eyes open. "Absolutely."

"Okay." But Stevie didn't move.

Her cell phone chimed, and her gaze leapt to her coat pocket. Russell, most likely, demanding to know where she was.

She peeled back the cuff of her sleeve and glanced at her watch, and then looked back to her mother. "Well, if you're sure you're all right—"

"Just thinking about shoes."

"Okay then." She gripped the edge of the footstool and pushed herself to her feet. "I should probably get back to the office. I'm already running late."

"Russell keeping you busy?"

"Always." Stevie gave her mother a small smile, though she was still staring up at the plaster above. "So…I'll see you this evening?"

"Sure."

"Okay then." Stevie stepped away towards the kitchen, stopped by the stool at the end of the marble-topped island, glanced back to her mother who was still stargazing through the ceiling—_Just thinking about shoes. Right?_—and then she shook her head to herself and walked on. Everything was okay, everything was okay, everything was—

"God, I can't do this, Stevie."

Stevie froze. She turned back to face her mother, slowly, like a carousel doing its last round before it creaked to a stop, and as she stared at her mother, the _plink, plink, plink _of the water clock chimed with every third thud of her heart and Russell's voice echoed through her mind: _And how is your mother? How does she seem to you?_

_Fine_, she had said, _my mother is fine_.

Her mother had to be fine. Because fine meant her mother surviving another trauma; fine meant life returning to normal; fine meant sunset hacks at the horse farm; fine meant hurtling down snowbanks on cafeteria trays; fine meant playing Go Fish and gorging on popcorn; fine meant sharing a tub of Neapolitan ice cream and her mother letting her eat all of the strawberry; fine meant being a proud member of Team McCord; fine meant finding belonging in their family dynasty; fine meant being right to defer her place at law school; fine meant building something bigger than themselves; fine meant, maybe, just maybe, her mother becoming president one day.

Stevie took a tentative step towards the couch. "What did you say?"

"Nothing." Her mother slipped on her reading glasses and gathered up the pages that fanned across the footstool. She shuffled through them and then joggled them into rough stacks. "You'd better not keep Russell waiting; he gets mad when people are late, trust me."

"Right."

The words lingered in the air and wove with the trace of burnt toast. _I'm fine._ _Trust me._

Her cell phone bleeped and vibrated, sending a jolt through her thigh. She fumbled to retrieve it from her coat pocket, her gaze fixed on her mother as she lifted it to her ear. "Hello?"

Adele's voice hummed down the line. "Russell's brought the meeting forward, thought you should know."

"What? When to?"

"Half an hour, so if you haven't already left, you'd better get a move on."

Stevie pivoted towards the dining room. Half an hour. Drizzling. DC traffic. She strode through the house; her footsteps thumped off the floorboards, and the open folds of her trench coat swayed and lurched with her momentum.

"Everything okay?" Adele asked.

"What?" Stevie frowned. "Yeah, fine. I'll be there as soon as I can."

She hung up the phone and stuffed it back into her pocket as she stormed past the faded plum couch and into the entrance hall. The gloom seeped in like coastal fog through the veil of off-white gauze that stretched across the door. She stooped down and grabbed her heels from beneath the console table, and with one hand steadying her against the cool glass top, she tugged one shoe on, reached for the other, but then she stopped.

She stood up. One shoe off, one shoe on. Her whole body off-balance. She took a step, and then another, and then another. Bobbed up and down, up and down, up and down. Her mother was right. How could you not notice that? How could you just walk away and not realise that something was wrong?

_I mean you're walking around in a pair, and suddenly you only have one… God, I can't do this, Stevie._

And it hit her, like the flash of light that had struck the glass of the photo frame.

_And how is your mother?_ _How does she seem to you?_

Not okay. Definitely not okay.

She dipped her hand into her pocket. The tremor in her fingers stilled for a moment as they wrapped around the chill metal casing of the cell phone, only for it to return as she unlocked the screen, dialled the number and raised the phone to her ear.

_Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring_—

"Hey, sweetie."

"Dad?" Her voice wobbled. She swallowed, but her throat stuck as though trying to choke back the words. "It's Mom. I…I think something's wrong."

Her father's tone dropped. "Stay right there. I'm on my way."

* * *

**Thank you for your comments! ****I like reading the different opinions you have on what's going on.**


	27. Chapter Twenty-Five: talking in metap

**Chapter Twenty-Five**

**…****talking in metaphors.**

**Henry**

**1:46 PM**

"Where is she?"

The front door slammed shut. It juddered against its frame, and the window panes rattled.

Henry stormed through entrance hall and into the living room. The house passed by in a blur of vague shapes and sepia tones, the same haze that had engulfed him ever since Stevie had phoned in the middle of the faculty meeting. '_It's Mom. I…I think something's wrong_.'

Stevie rose from her seat on the armchair nearest the piano, and smoothed out the creases in her suit skirt. "She's in the den, but—"

Henry hurried past her and into the fog of the dining room. A hundred different scenarios raced through his mind; a fresh wave of images surged with each throb of his pulse.

Stevie's voice lifted as she called after him. "—but she seems okay now."

He halted, and spun around. "What?"

Stevie rested her hand atop the cloud grey trench coat that was draped over the back of the armchair, and she gave a small shrug, more of a flinch of the shoulders. "She's working."

He stared at her. A frown eased its way across his brow. "Working?"

She nodded.

The haze around him evaporated like morning mist; it left behind the breathless clarity that comes with the sunrise. _She was fine, it was okay, he could breathe_.

He paced back to the doorway between the dining room and the lounge. "What happened then?"

"I don't know." Stevie toyed with one of the buttons on the front of her coat, her fingers worrying the plastic. "When I got back she was all spaced out, and then she came round, but then she started talking about shoes."

"Shoes?" He gave her an incredulous look. "You're telling me I just walked out in the middle of a meeting and probably ran every single light on my way here because your mother was talking about _shoes_?"

He massaged his temples and shook his head to himself. _This was not happening_.

"Yes, but I don't think she was really talking about shoes." Stevie's lips bunched to one side. Her voice softened. "I think she was talking about Uncle Will."

His hand stilled. The incredulous look deepened. "Through shoes?"

She gave a slow nod.

"Stevie…" He let out a sigh that ached up from the bottom of his lungs. "When you said that something was wrong, I thought you meant she was fitting or had collapsed or was bleeding out somewhere, not that she was talking to you about metaphorical footwear."

Stevie folded her arms across her chest, tucked her fists beneath her elbows, and drew her chin in. Her whole posture bristled. "Okay, but it wasn't just the shoes. She was acting all spaced out and distant and…_weird_."

"You know how she gets when she hasn't slept."

"This isn't putting cornflakes in the refrigerator or loading clothes into the dishwasher." She stared him down. But less than two seconds later, the hardness in her expression shattered, as though it had only ever been a veneer, and a thin one at that. She chewed on the inside of her lip, and as she shook her head to herself, her gaze drifted towards the shadows of the pantry. "Look…maybe I'm just on edge because of what Russell said about her struggling, and maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions, but seeing her like that…it reminded me of Iran, of how she was after."

Her gaze flitted to meet his, and in an instant, the fear that lurked in her eyes transported him back to the night when he, Stevie and Alison had huddled together in his and Elizabeth's bedroom and had watched the footage of the coup play out on the television screen, as harrowing as it was relentless, all the while praying that they wouldn't see Elizabeth's image whilst they waited for the news—the real news.

But this wasn't the same. It wasn't that night, nor was it the weeks and months that had followed Elizabeth's return. He shook his head. "Stevie… This isn't Iran."

He motioned to the bottom of the stairs. Stevie perched on the second step and folded her hands in her lap. He took a seat next to her. He hunched forward, and with his elbows rested atop his thighs, he twisted to face her. "The doctors told your mom that she might never be able to speak to Uncle Will again, so right now she's grieving, and I know it's difficult having to see her like this, but she just needs some time to come to terms with it. That's all." He offered her a weak smile.

But Stevie shook her head. "It's not just that. Something feels…I don't know…_off_." She flung her hands up, at a loss for the right word. "I mean, the feeling down, I get, but everything else…?"

"As I said, she's tired, she's having trouble sleeping."

Her tone took on a sarcastic edge. "So, not at all like what happened after Iran."

His jaw tensed, a slight flare to his nostrils. "Look, I know that ever since Iran everybody likes to think that she's a breakdown waiting to happen, and it's true that what happened changed her, but she's not made of glass."

Stevie's voice strained, and her eyes widened. "I'm not saying that she's made of glass, I'm saying that she's spacing out, and acting weird, and maybe she is just thinking about shoes, but what if she isn't? What if there's something else going on? Something she's not telling you about."

He rubbed his jaw, and tried to relieve some of the tension that had taken hold. It might have worked too, had he not already been through this conversation with Russell and Jay and anybody else who felt the need to insist that Elizabeth was unable to cope, as though her grief were some kind of inconvenience that ought to be swept aside as quickly as possible. He shook his head to himself, and then met Stevie's eye again. "Has she had a panic attack?"

Stevie sought an answer from across the room, and as she stared out towards the empty hearth, she raised her shoulders in a half-shrug. "Not that I'm aware of."

He gestured towards the den, where—according to Stevie—Elizabeth was currently working, despite the fact she was so clearly unable to cope. "And when she was '_spaced out_', did she say anything to indicate she was reliving what happened, or did it look like she was acting it out?"

Stevie gave a slight shake of her head. "No…but not everyone—"

"And when she came round was she distressed, or did she lash out at you?"

"No, but that doesn't necessarily mean—"

"Then why can't you and Russell and everybody else just back off and give her the space she needs to process?" His voice soared above hers before he could rein it in. "Why can't you all just let her stop a minute and take the time to grieve?"

The words rang up through the living room and quivered into the ceiling. The silence that followed trembled like the surface of a bubble, shimmering and waiting to pop.

"Okay…" Stevie rolled her eyes, but tears spiked her lashes. "Message received."

She pushed herself up from the steps, and then grabbed her trench coat from the back of the armchair and slung it over her forearm. Her footsteps pounded the floorboards as she strode towards the front door, as angry as a toddler trying to stomp out her tears.

Henry clasped his head in one hand and dug his fingertips into his brow. "Stevie—"

"No." She gripped the edge of the console table, tugged on her high heels, and almost toppled over in her rush. "I thought I was being helpful, but whatever. Turns out I've probably just lost my job for nothing, and when Russell finds out why I didn't make it back in time for the meeting, he'll probably have Mom fired too, so now _I_ can be the reason why our lives completely fall apart."

"Stevie, wait." He paced towards her, but stopped at the end of the console table, letting her have her distance. "I'm sorry. I know you're worried about her…I'm worried about her too."

Stevie snatched her handbag from the foot of the table and wrenched the straps over her shoulder. She gripped the canvas so tight that her knuckles blanched. "Look, you're right. I don't know what's going on inside her head—and I hope to God I'm wrong—but as much as you might think you know her, you don't have a clue what's going on in there either."

He frowned. "So, you think she's lying when she says she doesn't remember?"

"No." She yanked open the door, and then shot him a look over her shoulder. "But I don't think you'd hear what she's saying even if she told you the truth."

The door slammed shut and the vibration reverberated through the walls; it shook through the floorboards and up through Henry's soles; it struck something in the depths of his core, and the sound rang out as faint yet as pure as the chime of crystal. Could Stevie and the others be right? Could there be something more to it? Did he miss the cracks that they saw?

But the voice of thirty years of a life shared drowned out that chime. No. They didn't know Elizabeth like he did, they hadn't seen the challenges she'd faced before and the ways in which she'd pulled through, and despite everything, this didn't feel like Iran. He knew her, he trusted her, and she'd tell him if there were something wrong.

* * *

The smell of burnt toast drifted in wisps in the air above the kitchen, like the threads of cirrus clouds that added texture to the otherwise unbroken blue of the sky.

Henry padded through to the den, and came to a stop behind the couch. "Hey, babe." He leant over the back of the cushions, paused, and when Elizabeth didn't duck away, he squeezed her shoulder, kissed the top of her head and breathed in the distant scent of her coconut shampoo.

"So, I'm guessing Stevie called you." Elizabeth tugged off her reading glasses and tossed them down onto the stacks of paper and State Department files that paved the footstool. The lenses caught the glare of the news footage that flowed and flashed in silence across the television screen.

"Yes." He sank down into the seat next to her. "She did."

Elizabeth leant back against the cushions, a binder still open in her lap, and she ran her fingertips along the upper edge of the pages, as though daring them to give her a paper cut.

Her hand stilled. Her voice came out flat. "She thinks I'm having flashbacks."

He twisted around, and folded his leg between them. With his arm propped against the back of the couch, he studied her expression. A faint frown gripped his brow. "Are you?"

She met his eye, held his gaze for a second drawn out to twice its length, then—"No."

He scrubbed one hand over his face. "Russell's convinced this is Iran 2.0, your staff are questioning whether you're fit to work, Stevie thinks you're talking in metaphors…"

"Isn't everything a metaphor?"

"I think you need to start talking about what happened."

She shook her head, causing the veil of her hair to tremble, and she stared down at the file in her lap. "What if I don't have anything to say?"

"Then tell me how you feel."

"What if I don't have anything to say about that either?"

He squeezed her hand atop the pages. "Just try."

She sat motionless. Whatever thoughts teemed through the alleyways of her mind thickened the air around her until it formed an impenetrable haze.

He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the edge of her thumb. "Anything at all."

Her chin lifted. "I feel…"

The silence stretched and stretched. She stared out across the room as though she hoped the news anchors on the television might hold the answer, and as she thought it over, examining every last nook of those alleyways, her shoulders rose and her chest swelled with a pent up breath, until—

"Tired." Her shoulders slumped and her whole body deflated. "Just tired."

"Still having bad dreams?"

Her gaze returned to the file, and it looked as though just saying the word 'tired' had sapped her of the last of her energy, the bags beneath her eyes now heavier somehow.

He frowned. _Nightmares could mean… _"Are they—"

She shot him a look. "They're not about what happened."

"Then what are they about?"

She gave a small shrug. "Just the same as before."

"Flying or falling?"

No reply.

"Do you want to talk about them?"

"Nothing to say." She tugged her hand free from beneath his, and dropped the file to the floor. It landed with a _whump_ against the rug. She eased up from the couch. "It's just a dream." Her bare feet padded across the floorboards as she drifted towards the kitchen; her body swayed ever so slightly, as though she were caught in an intangible breeze. "It's all just a bad dream."

He twisted around to keep his gaze on her. "But if it's the same dream that keeps recurring—"

"You said it before." She disappeared along the channel between the counter and the kitchen island. "I'm just worried about Will… Ever since I woke up, I've been worried about Will."

His brow furrowed. _Ever since she woke up… No— From the very second she woke up…_

He scrambled up from the cushions and followed her. He stopped by the stool at the end of the island as she emptied the stale coffee from the pot into the sink. "When you woke up in the hospital, the first thing you asked about was Will…"

Her shoulders tensed. She clunked the pot down next to the draining board, wrapped her fingers over the edge of the marble, and stared out through the window. The pane of glass was still rain-flecked and misted from the earlier drizzle.

"…but how did you know something had happened to him if you couldn't remember anything from that afternoon?"

The joints of her fingers turned white as she dug the stubs of her nails into the countertop. She took a deep breath—her shoulders rose in sync and bunched towards her ears—and she tilted her head back as though she were staring up at the venetian blinds where the white slats gathered in a compressed stack at the top of the window. "I just knew."

He eased a step closer, and his frown deepened. "Elizabeth—"

"I read it from your expression."

He swallowed back a snort. "You might be ex-CIA, but you could barely keep your eyes in focus, let alone get a read on me in two seconds flat. Even you aren't that good."

She turned her chin to her shoulder, and spoke slowly, her tone levelled. "So, not only am I a liar, but I'm a lousy spy too?"

"That's not what I said."

"Anything else you'd care to add?" She kept her back to him as she snatched up the empty coffee pot, strode away, and clattered it into its base. "Because I can think of at least a dozen other things that I'm not so great at."

"I'm just trying to understand what's going on with you." His fingers itched to reach out and touch her, to forge some kind of connection between them. He had felt powerless before, when he could do nothing more than hold her hand, but now, it felt as though half the time he couldn't even do that. Instead, he clutched the back of his neck and massaged the knots of his spine. "Look, I know this is hard for you and that it reminds you of your parents—"

"Please—" Her voice cracked. "Don't bring them into this."

"I want to help you."

The thump of her footsteps shook through the floorboards as she paced towards the toaster, with its two slices of charred bread that thrust from the top.

"People are concerned about you, and I keep telling them that this is just grief, but one minute you're angry, the next you're numb; you won't tell me how you're feeling, except that you're tired; you're not sleeping, and when you do, you're having nightmares; you're getting more and more distant… And maybe that's normal, maybe that's part of the grief…"

She opened the cupboard of the bin store, dropped the slices of toast into the bin, and then brushed the dusting of carbon from her fingertips.

"…but maybe they're right, maybe I'm not seeing things clearly, maybe I don't want this to be a repeat of Iran."

She slammed the cupboard shut. Her shout came just as loud and as sharp. "This isn't Iran."

He stuttered a step backwards.

Silence echoed between them. It strobed and whined.

Elizabeth clutched her head in one hand and stood facing the strip of wall at the end of the countertop. The oil painting of storm clouds swarming over the Grand Canyon at night peeked out from behind her. Her other hand grasped the empty folds of her tee where they hung over her hip, and formed a fist so tight that her knuckles threatened to break through the whitened skin.

"Okay…this isn't Iran." He eased half a step towards her, just close enough that the tension that pulsed from her body rippled through him. His heart still pounded from the abruptness of the outburst, and his skin prickled with a wariness that it might happen again. "Then tell me what I can do to help you get through this. Whatever you need, I'm here for you."

She rubbed her brow, and said nothing.

He took another half-step. "Elizabeth, look at me."

She shook her head, and her hand fell to her side.

"Why not?"

"Because if I do, I might say something you won't like."

Another half-step, so close that her faint warmth brushed over his skin. "You can tell me anything."

"Some things you can't take back."

He frowned. "What is it?"

The ends of her hair quivered around her shoulders.

Something inside of him sank. "Do you want me to leave?"

She shook her head, and the quiver turned to a quake.

"Then tell me."

"No." The word strained until she choked on it. She let go of her tee, and with the heel of her palm, she swiped at her eyes, one and then the other. "It doesn't matter. None of it matters."

"Elizabeth." He laid his palm against the back her hand where it hung limp at her side. More air than a touch passed between them. "Tell me."

When she didn't flinch or shove him away, he threaded his fingers through hers, and then tugged at her hand and coaxed her around to face him. Damp tracks stained her cheeks like the rivulets of rain that bleared their way down the window.

She clenched her jaw, and her gaze fought to meet his. "I'm not having flashbacks."

His brow furrowed. "Okay… I believe you." He searched her eyes, looking for something more, but everything was hidden in that pink-threaded blue haze.

She folded her arms across her chest, and gave a stilted shrug. "That's it."

But what was it that she had wanted to say? What was it that she thought would hurt him, that she knew she couldn't take back?

The corner of her lips twitched, and her body softened. "Henry, I'm tired, really tired, and I don't want to fight with you, not now."

"And I don't want to fight with you."

"Then can we please just not talk about this?" She slumped back against the wall and reached her hand out between them, her palm open, her fingers waiting for his. "Please."

He traced his gaze from the flutter of her fingertips, to the goosebumps that dappled her arms, to the soft curve of the lips he couldn't remember the last time he had been allowed to kiss, to the pleading look that clouded her eyes. And there was so much that he ought to say, thirty-five years of grief that she needed to talk about, but how far could he push her before the tenuous thread that wavered between them snapped?

"Please. Just sit with me."

He took her hand and squeezed. "Okay." Her fingers were cold. So cold.

They sat side by side on the couch, Elizabeth's hand limp beneath his own, as though she simply lacked the energy to break the contact. She rested her head back against grey woollen blanket that draped over the cushions, her eyes closed; her only movement was the shallow rise and fall of each breath, and even that seemed laboured, her chest weighed down by the cotton of her tee.

He watched her.

After a while, a slight pinch nicked the middle of her brow. It blossomed like the bud of a thought unfurling. "Do you ever think about what would've happened if we hadn't gotten back together after you left me?"

"I didn't leave you. I just needed some time to get my head together, that's all."

And maybe that's what she needed now. Just a little time to get her head together. To figure out what move to make next. To feel the fear that comes at the brink of a new stage of life, and to surrender herself to it before she could commit to the path that lay ahead.

She turned her hand over and grazed her fingertips up and down his palm. "You could've found someone else, settled down, had a nice normal life; no spying, no giving up what you love to move to DC, no media scrutiny, no people trying to harm your family."

"You are what I love." He stilled her fingers by lacing them with his own. "You and our kids and our life."

"You know, that night was probably one of the only times that Will actually showed up when I needed him. Even offered to let himself get beaten up if it would make me feel better. I don't think he would have gone through with it, though."

"He's your brother. He loves you."

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. She freed her hand from his, and pinched the bridge of her nose as though trying to squeeze back a fresh wave of tears. "And look where that got him."

He frowned at her, and his lips tensed. "I'm worried about you."

"Well, I really wish you wouldn't." She shook her head, and mussed her hair against the blanket.

A moment passed. Then her eyes flickered open for no more than a second, the ultraviolet flash of a supernova. "Henry…I'm not having flashbacks."

* * *

**Thank you for reading! And thank you for reviewing (if you have time)!**


	28. Chapter Twenty-Six: crisis

**Chapter Twenty-Six**

**…****crisis.**

**Henry**

**Saturday, 10th November, 2018**

**11:59 PM**

Henry smoothed his hand across the bed sheet. His fingers hungered for just a touch, for something to anchor himself to in the darkness before he could succumb to a second wave of sleep. But once again they returned cold and empty.

He propped himself up on one elbow, and the springs near the headboard let out a muffled creak as his weight shifted over them. He blinked open his eyes. Elizabeth's cell phone lay lifeless on the bedside table, next to the tumbler of water; its screen reflected the neon green glow of the alarm clock as the digits clunked over to midnight.

"'lisbeth?" His whisper rasped into the night. He cleared his throat. "Elizabeth?"

No reply.

He groaned and rolled over, and then eased his legs out from beneath the embrace of the covers, and as he sat stooped at the edge of the mattress, he scrubbed his face and rid himself of the last dregs of sleep. His hand fell back to his lap, and with his gaze, he traced a drunken arc through the dim light of the bedroom from the red dot that flagged the corner of the television screen, to the white spines that popped from the shelves of the bookcase, to the bronze handles that glimmered on the mahogany dresser, and towards the open door of the walkthrough closet.

His heart jumped. Then froze. Then the beat returned with a bang. "What are you doing?"

Elizabeth stood in the doorway. She floated on the cusp between the shadows that encroached from the bathroom behind her and the pallid yellow haze that unspooled through the chink in the curtains and pooled at her feet. Street lamps diluted with moon beams.

She stared back at him, her eyes glassy in that in-between light. "Thinking."

"About…?"

"Thoughts."

His gaze flicked over her, from her tousled hair to the toes that peeked out beneath the cuffs of her pyjama bottoms and that curled into the floorboards. "What kind of thoughts?"

"Just thoughts."

"Well, is there any chance you can think your thoughts in bed? It's late, and you need sleep, I need sleep." He braced himself against the mattress and pushed himself up to standing. With his muscles straining against every step, he hobbled towards her.

He rubbed her upper arms, her skin icy beneath his touch. "Come on, let me hold you, I'll get you warmed up, and you can tell me what's on your mind."

She shrugged him off, like a horse twitching away a fly, and she retreated half a step and centred herself beneath the door frame. "No."

His brow furrowed, and he searched her eyes. "Okay…then just talk to me."

Her gaze dipped to her feet.

"Elizabeth…" He rubbed his jaw and shook his head to himself. "I'm trying my best to be patient here, I'm trying to understand, but I'm not a mindreader. You've got to give me something."

The seconds stretched between them. Her gaze held to the floor. It felt as though he'd have a better chance of getting a reaction out of a glass figurine, and it would probably show him twice as much warmth.

"I'm your husband, but this—" He motioned between them. "—doesn't work when you refuse to talk to me."

Still nothing.

"You know what—" He tossed one hand up. "Fine. You win. You don't want to talk, you don't want to sleep, then that's up to you, but I'm fed up of this silence, I'm fed up of you forcing this distance between us." He turned his back on her and retreated to the bed. "I just want my wife back."

He yanked back the quilt and knelt against the edge of the mattress, ready to slump into whatever heat remained, when—

"Do you know how many people have died because of me?"

Her voice shivered through the air, like a tremulous breath fogging into a winter's night.

He froze. He turned to face her, his brow gripped with a frown. "What?"

"I don't." Her shoulders jerked in a shrug. "I tried to count them all."

"What are you talking about?"

"That's what I was thinking about." She met his gaze, but the distance in her eyes remained. "I tried to count them. All the assets I ran, all the colleagues whose lives I reduced to a calculated risk, all the friends who trusted me and whom I let down, all the people who died in order to protect me, my parents, and now Will—"

His frown deepened, and he edged a step closer to her. The chill of the floorboards prickled up through his bare soles. "Will's not dead, and none of those are your fault."

"And those are only the ones I know, the ones that I can name. But what about all the others?" She gestured towards the windows behind him, and the face of her watch caught a glimmer of moonlight and threw off ghosts into the dark. "The thousands and thousands of people whom I've never even met, but who have all died because of a decision that I made. Men, women…children."

He eased another step towards her, and shook his head. "You're not responsible for any of those, and you're not responsible for what happened to Will. Someone did this to you, to both of you."

"And then it came to me…" Her expression eased, and her eyes shone with exquisite clarity, a kind that muddied crystal in comparison. "I'm the one who should be dead."

The floor dropped from beneath him. "What?"

"I should be dead, because if I were dead, then all those other people would have lived."

His jaw clenched so tight that he had to force the words out. "Don't say that."

"Why not?"

"Because it's not true."

"Isn't it?"

And the look in her eyes was so pure, it was enough to have him questioning.

But then a tear spilled over and streamed down her cheek, and she swept it away with the edge of her thumb. He rushed towards her, but before he could reach her, she held up one hand, a stop sign trembling.

"The people I love get hurt, Henry; they die, and it's my fault."

He shook his head. "That's not true."

"It's a simple equation, basic math. My life, versus thousands of others—" A second tear escaped her. She swiped it aside with a knuckle. "—and how can my life be worth so much more than theirs?"

"It doesn't work like that." He stepped towards her again.

But her fingertips formed a star, ready to shove him back. "And how many more people have to die because of me?" She gestured towards the windows once more, as though she could see the column of people conveyed through the lamplit streets, a factory line destined for her gallows.

"People would die regardless."

"Will wouldn't."

He clutched his brow; his fingernails bit into his temples with a dull sting. "Will's. Not. Dead."

Her voice softened. "Not yet." She gave a half-nod, conceding that point. Then her gaze flicked up to meet his, and there was a hardness in her eyes unlike any he had ever seen before, as though the sky had frozen and fractured into a million shivering pieces. "But I should be."

And one by one those fragments fell.

"I should have died in a car crash, I should have been captured and shot more times than I can count, I should have been hanged for espionage, I should have been stoned to death in the streets, I should have been blown to pieces in a car bomb, I should have been obliterated in a drone strike, I should have had my neck snapped in a single car collision, I should have been tortured until death was a mercy, I should have suffocated on the back of a truck, I should have been held under water until I drowned, I should have been beheaded by ISIS, I should have been mown down by bullets in Iran…" She swallowed and shook her head. Her whole body trembled whilst the tears flowed freely, rivulets and tributaries staining her face. "I should have succumbed to the poison, I was the one they wanted to kill, so don't tell me it's not true when I say that I should be dead."

Henry stared at her. His mouth gaped for words—any words—whilst the seconds drifted up like threads of smoke to hang in a blanket over the room. A thick hush of time.

"Elizabeth…" He crept towards her.

But she cowered away.

"Come here." He held out his hand.

She shook her head, and a snuffle escaped her as she rubbed away the tears with the heel of her palm. "This is my fault. People get hurt because of me."

"That's not true."

She groaned, her head fell back against the door frame, and she clenched the hem of her tee in both fists. "Stop saying that." She slid down the edge of the wood, until she huddled on the floor with the cotton—once white, now faintly pink from a red sock that had bled in the wash—stretched over her knees. A sob hiccuped through her chest, she pressed her eyes into her palms, and her whole body quivered.

He grabbed the cardigan that was strewn across the bench at the end of their bed, and then knelt down beside her and draped it over her shoulders. He paused, and then reached out and stroked her hair back, tucking the silky strands behind her ear.

This time she didn't resist or flinch back from the touch, just sat there and stared at the floorboards in front of her as though they existed in a world far beyond the bounds of this one, her face half lit by the moonlight, half hidden in the shadows. The words tumbled from her lips in less than a whisper. "I don't deserve to be here."

His brow furrowed. It felt as though the words had punctured his lungs and the air had started to hiss out. She couldn't mean… She wouldn't… He had to be wrong.

He eased to his feet and took a step back, the distance now welcome, the silence now welcome. He stared down at her, his wife, his Elizabeth. He swallowed, and his throat caught. "When you said that you 'should be dead', you didn't mean…you weren't trying to tell me that you _want_ to be dead…right?"

And she would look up at him with a pitted frown, as though he were insane; she would shake her head, her honeyed locks shimmering, and say '_Of course not_'; and he would chuckle at the dark places the mind could go at night; then he would take her hand and lead her back to their bed; and in the morning he would awaken to her gentle warmth in his arms and sunlight unravelling through the blinds, and as she stroked his hair with a touch as soft as a lullaby, he would tell her all about the nightmare he'd had.

But she didn't.

She looked up at him.

The shadows closed in around her.

And she fell into their darkness.

He stumbled backwards, a blow to the chest, every last drop of air forced from his lungs.

Day was night; up was down; left was right; the sky was green; and the earth crumbled into dust. She had told him the truth: _I'm not having flashbacks. This isn't Iran_. But just as Stevie had predicted, he hadn't heard her. He had listened to everyone else, to all those voices telling him this was PTSD, but he hadn't listened to her. _I'm not having flashbacks_. Because if he had heard her, he would have asked: Then what thoughts are you having? And she was right about that too: Her answer would hurt. Because he had failed her. He had told her it was just grief, just a little more sleep and you'll feel better, just a little more rest and everything will be fine. He knew her, and he should have seen it. He knew her, but in that moment all he saw was that she, his Elizabeth, had gone.

He snatched his cell phone from the bedside table, and knocked his reading glasses to the floor.

"What are you doing?"

"You need help." His thumb fumbled over the digits of the passcode. _Buzz_. Try again. _Come on, come on._ "You need to speak to someone."

"I don't want to speak to someone."

He spun around to face her. "And I don't want you to hurt yourself."

She padded across the floor towards him. "Henry, please don't do this."

"I should've seen this." He scrolled through the contacts. No one. No one to call. Who was he supposed to call? He shook his head to himself. "I should've seen the signs."

"I'm not your dad, Henry."

He stopped and looked her in the eye. "You're right, you're not. Because he never said anything, he never gave me the chance to help, and I've got to believe that what you're saying, all this right now, this is you reaching out and asking me for help."

"I don't need help."

"Elizabeth, you're talking about…about…" He ran one hand through his hair and then clutched the back of his neck. His fingernails dug into the ridges of his spine.

His hand fell back to his side, and he chucked his phone onto the pink floral patterned throw that crumpled across the bed. It bounced one, somersaulted, and then landed with its screen facing down. He skirted around the bench at the end of the bed and grabbed her cell phone out from the neon shadow of the alarm clock. "You're getting help."

He tapped in her passcode. _Buzz._

He tapped it in again. _Buzz_.

He looked up at her. She stared back. The reflection of the yellowed light that snuck through the curtains behind him gleamed in her eyes.

He held the phone out to her. "Unlock it."

She shook her head.

"Unlock it. Now."

She stepped towards him; the cuffs of her pyjama bottoms ruffled around her toes. She took the phone from him, and then turned around and dropped it onto the cushion of the bench. She faced him again, drew closer, looked up into his eyes, a slight wince. "Henry, of course I didn't mean that. I'm sorry if I scared you. I'm just tired, I just want to sleep."

She trailed her fingertips down his arm. Her touch grazed over his skin like the chill in the air. And then she squeezed his hand and tugged him towards the mattress. "Come back to bed. You can hold me."

He shook his head, his jaw clenched. "No."

"Henry." Her tone sharpened, and she backed up a step and folded her arms across her chest. "I didn't say anything."

"Yes, you did, you said plenty."

Her voice shot up. "Only because you were having a go at me for not talking, only because you were bitching about wanting your wife back." She swept her hand towards the closet doorway. She held his gaze for a breathless moment whilst anger fizzled beneath her surface. Then she let out a huff, turned her back on him, and hauled the covers off her side of the bed. "I thought I could trust you, but if you're just going to use that against me and start making assumptions."

He picked up the cell phone from the bench and held it out to her as she curled up on her side, facing out towards the windows. "Elizabeth, unlock the phone."

"Just leave me alone."

"No." He crouched down beside her. "Look me in the eye and tell me you haven't thought about it, tell me that I'm wrong." He laid his hand against her fist where it peeked out from beneath the covers, and he brushed his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. His voice softened. "Please tell me that I'm wrong."

She glared at him and snatched her hand away. "You're wrong."

His body deflated, and he shook his head. "I don't believe you."

"Well, that's your problem—" She rolled over and yanked the sheet up to her ears. "—don't make it mine."

He perched on the edge of the mattress, looking down over her, and he resisted the urge to prise the sheet back and uncover her face. "I know you, Elizabeth. And I know how scary this must be. I'm scared too. But it's okay to admit that you're struggling, it's okay to ask for help."

The silence between them strained, like a girth cinching tighter notch by notch, until the leather creaked and there was nothing left to give.

The words floated up through the cotton. "Maybe you'd all be better off if I were dead."

"Right, that's it." He jerked the sheet free from her grasp, and shoved her cell phone in front of her face. "Either you unlock this phone right now and call Dr Sherman yourself, or I swear to God I'll call Russell Jackson and have him give me her private number."

She scrambled up to sitting. "Do that and I will never forgive you." Her glare sharpened. "I mean it, Henry. I will leave you."

His heart stung, but he gave her a sorry smile and a small shrug. "I can live with that. What I can't live with is doing nothing now and you hurting yourself, or worse."

"I'm. Not. Going. To. Hurt. Myself."

"Last chance." He held the phone out to her. "Unlock the screen."

Her cheek hollowed as she bit down on the inside of her mouth.

And perhaps that look was enough to make brutal dictators blink, but they didn't have half as much to lose. Henry held her gaze and edged the phone towards her. "I'm serious, Elizabeth."

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.

"Fine." He leant across and grabbed his own cell phone from where it rested atop the covers on the opposite side of the bed. He unlocked the screen and scrolled down through the recent contacts. His thumb descended towards Russell Jackson's number, the world warped into slow motion, then—

"Just give it here." She held out her hand, her palm facing up.

He froze, dazed by the mental whiplash as the world leapt into double-time.

Her fingers twitched for her cell phone. "Give it here."

He blinked. The world oscillated towards its regular tempo. Then he nodded and placed his phone down between them. He handed over her cell phone, and she snatched it from him.

And God she might hate him, but at least she hadn't called his bluff, at least there was still some part of her that recognised that she needed—

She darted forward and grabbed up his cell phone too, and then twisted around, scrabbled towards the edge of the bed and dropped them both into the tumbler of water on her bedside table.

She shot him a look. "I don't need help."

She nestled back into the bed and tugged the covers up around her.

Henry stared at her, open mouthed, until his tongue turned dry. "Oh, I think you do."

* * *

Henry crept down the corridor towards the room at the far end of the landing, and then tapped against the door before he eased it open. He tiptoed to the edge of the bed and shook Stevie's arm where it lay atop the patchwork quilt and hugged the covers around her. "Stevie?"

She jolted awake, her eyes wide, her gaze reeling. "Was wrong?" The words slurred together.

"I need to borrow your phone."

"Was happened?" Her fingers scrambled over the bedside table before they clutched hold of her cell phone. She blinked in the glare from the screen and tapped in her passcode, and then handed it over to Henry. "S'everything okay?"

"Everything's fine. Just go back to sleep."

She nodded, her gaze foggy as though she were still dreaming, and she slumped back against the pillows.

Henry stood outside the doorway to his and Elizabeth's bedroom. He peered through the gap towards the bundle beneath the covers, the cell phone held to his ear.

_Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring, ring—_

"This had better be good." Russell's voice croaked.

"Russell, it's Henry…I think Elizabeth's having some kind of crisis."

* * *

**Thank you for your comments! They make my day so much brighter.**


	29. Chapter Twenty-Seven: a good husband

**Chapter Twenty-Seven**

**…****a good husband.**

**Henry**

**Sunday, 11th November, 2018**

**2:01 AM**

A good husband supports his wife, a good fighter pilot remains calm under pressure, a good analyst assesses the situation and acts rationally. All that had been thrown out the window the moment Elizabeth looked up at him with shadows in her eyes. _Tell me you haven't thought about it, tell me that I'm wrong_, he had said, and when she'd answered, he hadn't believed her. But based on what? A thought, a feeling, a ghost…? Less than two hours had passed and already the events of that night felt as nebulous as the wisps of a dream—they threaded in and out of the mind, and disintegrated at the touch. _I'm not your dad, Henry._

"How's she doing?" Henry braced himself against the arms of the chair and rose from the seat. The wood was warm from where he'd clung to it as he waited.

The study door trundled shut, and as Dr Sherman rounded the end of the couch, Henry stared through the glass panes to where Elizabeth sat in the armchair in the corner, one leg hugged loosely to her chest, her toes curled over the edge of the pale mauve cushion. The gold of her wedding ring caught the light from the wall sconce above, and it gleamed as she slipped it back and forth over the middle joint of her finger.

Dr Sherman gestured for him to retake his seat. "Well, she's calmed down now, and she's talking a little, though you can tell she's been trained in interrogation techniques."

"She was a force to be reckoned with even before she joined the CIA." He lowered himself into the chair. "But she's talking. That's good, right?"

Dr Sherman flashed him a taut smile, and placed her handbag at the foot of the empty hearth. The black leather sagged in on itself. "It's a start."

Once she had settled into the adjacent armchair, her smile waned.

The _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the clock on the mantlepiece pulsed into the silence. It made the hush feel thicker somehow.

She dragged her gaze over him, as though she were tracing every line of his face and committing each one to memory. Then she opened her mouth, and her chest rose with a breath that she held for one second, two seconds, three— A sharp sigh. "She needs help, Henry."

He stared at her. A frown worked its way across his brow. "I know. That's why I called."

She shook her head. "I mean proper help."

The frown deepened. "Proper help?"

"Residential treatment."

The clock stopped. The air whined.

His mind reeled. "I'm sorry. What?"

"A clinic."

"A clinic?" His tongue rolled the words over as though testing them out for the first time.

She rifled through her bag, and the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ kicked back in. The world remained out of sync, though, a lag introduced that might never go away.

"There's a centre that I work with not far from here, very good, very discreet." She leant forward in her seat and held out a business card to him—black text printed over a background of blush pink. "I'd like for her to come in tonight."

He stared at the card, and his eyes widened. "You mean right now? As an inpatient?"

"She can come in voluntarily, or I can place her under an involuntary hold."

"You mean have her _committed_?"

The corners of her lips tweaked and pulled them into a flat line. She placed the business card down at the edge of the mahogany accent table that stood between their two seats. "I'm hoping she'll come in voluntarily."

"I don't understand." He rubbed at his mouth, and then his hand fell back to his lap. "She didn't make any threats, she didn't say she was planning anything, she's never shown any sign of harming herself. Isn't this a bit…extreme?"

"She's behaving erratically, she's not thinking rationally, and often patients who present with passive ideation have elements of active ideation too. The switch can flip incredibly quickly."

"Passive what?"

"She's not safe, Henry."

Through the glass, Elizabeth continued to slip her wedding ring off and on, off and on, whilst the yellowed light shimmered on her hair and cast stagnant shadows all around her.

This wasn't meant to happen. She was just meant to talk to someone. She'd calmed down, she'd agreed to speak to Dr Sherman, she'd sat there for a whole hour without incident, hadn't she?

He returned to Dr Sherman. "She's safe with me. I can take time off work and stay at home with her, I can keep an eye on her, I can—"

"You can't watch her twenty-four hours a day, and these kinds of situations can change very rapidly. You said yourself about her mood swings."

"Yes, she gets angry and upset, but she has every right to be."

"She's saying the world would be a better place without her in it. She's blaming herself for what happened to her and her brother. And she's clearly not taking care of herself." Dr Sherman swept her hand towards the study, and her own rings caught a glimmer of the pallid light that filtered through the living room like sunshine without its warmth.

His gaze flitted to Elizabeth again—a little thin, a little disheveled, a little withdrawn—and then back to Dr Sherman.

"When's the last time she slept?" Dr Sherman said. "And I mean proper sleep."

"I…I don't know. She gets some sleep here and there."

"She tells me it's been nearly four weeks."

He shook his head, and his brow creased into a deep frown. "That can't be—"

But then he stopped. First there were the dreams and dragging the DS guys out on early morning runs, then the poisoning and staying up all night in the hospital looking for ways to help Will, then coming home and drinking all that caffeine. Four weeks? Could it have been?

"She's severely sleep-deprived, amongst other things, and I suspect that's having a major impact on her current state of mind."

"And that could be making her feel like this? Lack of sleep?"

"It's a possibility, but…"

The rest of the words whined into white noise as something in his chest lightened, as though a breath had been stuck at the bottom of his lungs but now rushed up and escaped. _A possibility_ meant that whatever this was wasn't permanent, _a possibility_ meant that this glimpse of a nightmare really could fade away, _a possibility_ meant that Elizabeth could be herself again.

"I'm going to recommend that she has medication to help her sleep, then I can reassess her symptoms once she's rested." Dr Sherman studied him for a long moment. "But that doesn't change the fact that the thoughts she's having right now pose a serious risk to her safety."

His fingertips dug into the furrows of his brow. "But she didn't actually say anything." His hand fell to the armrest of his chair, and he bounced his fingers against the deep mahogany. He stilled, and his gaze darted up to meet Dr Sherman's. "Look, can't she sleep here? I can give her the medication and make sure she's supervised."

Dr Sherman shook her head, and the ends of her hair ruffled against the collar of her blouse. "This needs to be done at a proper facility, by people trained to deal with these types of situation."

He leant forward in his seat. "This is my fault for telling her things would be okay. I should've realised how much she was struggling and insisted she got help sooner, but now it feels like she's being punished for my mistake."

"You're not responsible for her, Henry. She knows better."

The words bristled against him like the chill in the air that came with each draught that tumbled out through the fireplace. "What do you mean?"

"Part of her on-going treatment plan is to reach out to me in an event like this, but the first I've heard of this situation is being called here tonight. She's not prioritising her mental health, and that concerns me."

"She's been busy dealing with her brother."

"That's no excuse." She massaged the grooves of her brow, and her body deflated with her sigh, the message clear: he just didn't see what she wanted him to see.

But clinics were for when you'd lost all hope, when you'd reached rock bottom, when you'd exhausted all other options. Surely? And Elizabeth was struggling, she'd had a bad night, but—

"She shouldn't be forced to go away from her home, from her family. That's what started this all in the first place, feeling like she's lost part of her family." Henry rose from the chair and paced away towards the end of the couch. He gripped the back of his neck, shook his head to himself, and then spun back to face Dr Sherman. "Taking her away now…it'll just make her feel worse. She just needs a bit more support, and she can get that by having counselling from home."

"Maybe if she'd come to me when this all began."

"What's a few weeks?" He flung a gesture towards the study doors behind him. "It took her ages to realise she needed help after Iran."

She arched her eyebrows. "And how did that turn out?"

His jaw tensed. The flashbacks, the panic attacks, the fear that he might lose her all over again.

She leant forward in her seat, and clutched her hands in front of her. The silver chain of her necklace swayed against her crumpled collar. "We have a narrow window here, Henry. If she doesn't start processing this trauma immediately, she's at high risk of PTSD and depression."

He sank down onto the cushion of the couch, hunched forward, and pressed his fist to his lips. Why did these things have to happen to her? Why did people have to do this to their family?

He shook his head. "She won't want to go, she won't like being away."

"It's not a matter of what she wants, but what's best for her."

"But what about her work? That always helps. She's meant to be back at the office on Tuesday."

"She's not fit for work, not until she's engaged with therapy."

He bowed his head, and his gaze dipped to the floor beneath the glass of the coffee table. "I don't want her going away. She needs to be here, being supported by her family."

"Right now, the best thing you can do to support her is to let her go."

He snorted. _What a cliché_.

"She reached out to you tonight, and you listened to her and you called me. I understand that it's frustrating, but sometimes that's all you can do."

His gaze snapped up. "But I didn't think calling you would result in her being taken to a _facility_." He gestured towards the business card that leered at him from the accent table opposite.

"And it's not something I suggest lightly."

He ruffled one hand through his hair, and then let it fall back to his lap. "Why can't she go, get some sleep, then if she's feeling better, continue her therapy here?"

"That's an option she might decide to take, but it's not one that I would recommend."

"But it's an option?"

She pinched her brow, and the look that simmered beneath her facade suggested he wasn't the only one feeling the frustration. She took a deep breath and looked up at him again. "Intensive early intervention is her best chance of making a full recovery. I'm talking about the difference between her being the same as she was four weeks ago, and her having to deal with panic attacks, triggers, flashbacks and low mood for the rest of her life."

"So, she has daily sessions from home. What's the difference?"

"The change of environment and removing her current stress is crucial. She'll have trained professionals available twenty-four hours a day. She'll have access to group therapies and a wider range of support. As I said, it's the difference between true recovery and just managing symptoms."

He sank back against the cushions and stared up at the shadows that tremored across the ceiling, their edges vague and elusive. Elizabeth had to get better, she had to get through this. He couldn't condemn her to a lifetime of just coping, but— "I'm not going to tell her she has to go. I can't do that to her, not unless it's the only option."

"I'm not asking you to, but I am asking you to support this decision."

"She said she'd leave me just for calling you."

"And what does that tell you about her state of mind?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head to himself whilst he tried to chase the image of her slipping her wedding ring off and on from his thoughts. "She needs help, she needs support. But isolating her? Taking away her freedom?" A chill prickled up the back of his neck as another draught spilled out of the hearth and diffused through the room. "You say she's not safe here, but going there could make her worse. On the other hand, she could stay here, get some sleep, start counselling, and then be fine."

"She could." Dr Sherman's gaze flitted beyond him, into the study behind, and then back again. "Or she could spiral. Maybe not immediately, but at some point. You can bury a trauma as much as you like, but it always comes out sooner or later." She stared him in the eye. "This is her chance, Henry."

He bit down on the inside of his cheek and shook his head. "I shouldn't have called. I should have listened to her. She told me not to call you."

"But you did." Elizabeth's voice came from behind him.

He whipped around.

Elizabeth hovered in the doorway, her head bowed, her hair swept in a half-veil across her face. She rolled her wedding ring between forefinger and thumb, back and forth, back and forth. "And now I have a choice: Refuse and be compelled to go, or agree and go of my own accord."

He eased up from the seat and edged around the end of the couch, and as he stood in front of her, he laid a tentative hand against her elbow and dipped down in an effort to catch her gaze. "No one's going to compel you to do anything." He rubbed her arm. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have confronted you like that, I just…I thought… And I panicked."

She folded the ring into her fist, and her hair quivered like a sail fluttering in the wind. "I know what you thought."

His hand stilled against her arm. Had he overreacted? Had he made assumptions? He had been so sure in the moment, but now… With her shoulders sagged and with the loose folds of her cardigan bundled around her, her hands half-buried in the sleeves, all that anger had drained away and it left her looking…deflated.

All he wanted to do was to wrap her in his arms and hold her close, to keep her safe until this—whatever this was—passed. But Dr Sherman's words surged through his mind: _PTSD, depression, flashbacks, panic attacks, low mood for the rest of her life_. They had to do something.

He stepped closer, placing his feet either side of hers, and he smoothed his palms up the outside of her arms to just below her shoulders and then squeezed. "Just agree to counselling, and you can stay here, and I promise we'll get you as much help as you need."

She shook her head, her gaze still lowered to the fists that peeked out from her sleeves. "No."

"Elizabeth—"

Her head snapped up. "I want to go."

"What?" His hands fell away.

"To the clinic. I want to go."

"But…"

Her expression softened, and she looked up at him, half wince, half plea. "Remember when Jason was still having night feeds, and Alison had that cough that wouldn't go away, and Stevie had tonsillitis? We'd just get one of them to go to sleep, and then fifteen minutes later another one would wake up. Or half an hour would pass when they'd all been quiet, and then we'd panic that something had happened and we'd have to get up and go check on them anyway."

He gave a slow nod.

"Well, this tiredness right now makes that look like a vacation." She took his hand and tugged at his fingers. "I just want to get some sleep."

The shadows beneath her eyes deepened, and the pink threads that spidered across the whites brightened with the tears that welled over the surface. She slipped her wedding ring back on, and then dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve.

"I can't keep doing this, Henry. I'm exhausted, emotionally, physically, and half the time it feels like I don't even know who I am anymore, I don't know what I'm going to say or do next."

He tucked her hair back behind her ear, and then cupped her cheek and brushed away a stray tear with his thumb. "You're my wife."

"But I won't be if I keep yelling at you."

"I can take it."

She looked up and met his eye, and a fresh set of tears spilled over. "But I don't want you to. I don't want to be waiting until you fall asleep and then getting up again and sitting on my own, I don't want to be pushing you away because I'm scared I might lose you if I hold you close, I don't want to be unable to tell you that I love you because I feel numb inside."

A deep ache spread through his chest. When was the last time she had said that she loved him? When was the last time he had awoken with her in his arms?

He tried to swallow, but his throat was too tight. "You want to go?"

She shook her head. "No. But I want to sleep." Tears tumbled down from the line of her jaw and dappled the front of her t-shirt. "And I want to come back, I want to feel like me again."

* * *

**2:59 AM**

Henry trailed his hand along the banister as he staggered down the stairs; the bag in his opposite hand lurched with every step. Elizabeth stood by the front door, her black woollen coat huddled around her, like a swatch of darkness had seeped in from outside and swathed her in its folds.

Dr Sherman was speaking to her in a low whisper, but when Henry approached, she stopped. With the wisp of a smile, she held her hand out for the bag. "I'll give you two a minute." She looked back to Elizabeth, and laid her hand against her arm, her thin eyebrows ever so slightly raised. "I'll be waiting in the car."

Elizabeth nodded. She watched as the door clunked into its frame and as the gauze curtains shivered and then settled. Then she turned to face him. She looked down at the floor and shuffled a step closer, and then with a tweak of her lips, she stared up into his eyes. "So… I'm sorry about drowning your phone."

He chuckled. "I wanted an upgrade anyway."

Their smiles met for a moment, and then dwindled. He closed the gap between them and gathered her in his arms. Her body tensed at first as he held her tight and cradled her head to his shoulder, but like winter yielding to the first days of spring, she melted into the touch. She wrapped her arms around him and bunched the back of his tee in her fists whilst he peppered kisses to her crown and breathed in the fragile scent of coconut shampoo, the trace of jasmine in her perfume, and just _her_, lingering over the breath as though it might be his last. He never wanted her to leave.

A tremble shook through her, and she pushed herself away again. "I've got to go."

He nodded. "I'll be right here if you need me. Anything at all."

She gave him a weak smile, and then turned and laid her fingers against the door handle.

"Elizabeth," he called after her. "I love you."

"I know." She heaved open the door, and a bitter gust whipped through the hall. "I'll see you soon."

She stepped up to edge, where the floorboards met the black and white tiles of the porch. Then she stopped. She took a breath so deep that it rolled right to the balls of her feet, and then with her head bowed, she turned her chin towards her shoulder, her face hidden by the sweep of her hair. "I'm sorry that I lied to you."

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Earlier on, when you asked me if I'd thought about it…I'm sorry that I lied."

And before the words had time to hit him, she crossed over that border and strode away along the path; the soles of her sneakers slapped against the damp paving slabs and sent up beads of rainwater that glistened like golden chrome in the haze of the streetlights. The night enveloped her, and the distance between them yawned into an expanse of silence, whilst like pallbearers, the black-suited DS agents folded in behind.

What if he had refused to have her taken to the clinic? What if she hadn't come through and agreed to leave? What would he have found the next time he awoke to cold sheets beside him?

A good analyst trust his instincts, a good fighter pilot knows there's no time to second-guess, a good husband listens to the words his wife doesn't say. All that had been thrown out the window the moment Dr Sherman used the phrase 'residential treatment'. _She's behaving erratically, she's not thinking rationally, and often patients who present with passive ideation have elements of active ideation too_, she had said, and though he'd heard her, he hadn't believed her. But based on what? Thinking that he knew Elizabeth better, feeling that he should be able to help her, fear of what that truth might mean…? Less than three hours had passed and already the events of that night felt as tortuous and invasive as the tendrils of a nightmare—they infiltrated the deepest recesses of the mind, set to linger long after waking, set to linger for a lifetime. _I'm sorry that I lied_.

* * *

**Thank you for reading the story so far!**

**I hope you'll join me tomorrow for the beginning of part three.**

**Thoughts are appreciated. : )**


	30. Chapter Twenty-Eight: jigsaw puzzles

**Note**: Welcome to the third part of this story. I hope you're enjoying it so far! Thank you to everyone who has left a review. Knowing that people are reading and enjoying my work gives me a real boost, and I love reading all your perspectives on what's happening and what you think might happen next.

* * *

**Chapter Twenty-Eight**

**…****jigsaw puzzles.**

**Elizabeth**

**4:06 AM**

Gravel popped and churned beneath the tyres as the car rolled along the track towards the clinic. The car arced into the car park, trundled along the stretch opposite the glass doors that opened onto the foyer, and then—with a creak of the brakes—it ground to a halt. Darkness enveloped the upper levels of the red brick building, except for the occasional glimmer that snuck through the gaps in the curtains, whilst the ground floor simmered with dimly yellow lights. Perhaps that glow was meant to exude a warmth like the licks of amber flames that danced in the hearth at home, but instead it sent a shiver across the inside of Elizabeth's skin, and she drew the woollen folds of her coat tighter around her.

Dr Sherman clicked off her seatbelt, and twisted around to face Elizabeth. "This is usually the point where people start having second thoughts."

Elizabeth gave a soft snort. "How about sixth or seventh thoughts?"

The headlights of the SUVs behind them flicked off and the shadows around the car flared. Elizabeth sank deeper into the seat whilst the clunk of car doors echoed out like gunshots into the night, followed by the scrunch of footsteps as a string of three DS agents filed towards the clinic. The first set of glass doors swooped aside for the agents when they approached. Meanwhile, the other agents formed neat lines, alternating facing in and facing out as they boxed in Dr Sherman's car.

"Do you want to go for a walk while your security do their checks?" Dr Sherman's gaze raked over Elizabeth. When Elizabeth gave no reply, she added, "You don't have to talk if you don't want to." Another pause. "Either that or we can sit inside."

Elizabeth considered it for a moment, and then gave a half-nod. "I could walk."

* * *

The DS agents formed a loose cage around Elizabeth and Dr Sherman as they ambled across the car park and over to the track that wound its way through the ghostly trunks of the paper birches and towards the grey stone pillars and arrow-tipped gates that they had driven through only minutes before. The gravel rasped with every step.

The wind whipped around them and stirred the leaves of the black walnut tree that stood in the middle of the grassy island at the centre of the car park. Elizabeth buried her hands in her coat pockets as a tingle gripped the tips of her fingers and images flashed through her mind: swathes of grass swayed beneath star-studded skies; her heartbeat thundered through her ears as her bare feet pounded the earth; branches thrust and roots jutted over the abyss; her fingernails dug into the rough grooves of the bark; then a lull, a transcendence, fly or fall?

She stopped, braced herself against her knees, and sucked in a lungful of breath, the air so crisp that it caused her chest to tighten around it. With her eyes forced wide, she pushed back against the images until they disintegrated beneath her touch, and then she grasped for something, anything, to anchor herself to before any other images could rush in: the shards of gravel beneath the soles of her sneakers, the sting of the breeze against the bare skin of her ankles, the smell of coal smoke that wisped through the air, the sound of Dr Sherman's voice—

"Elizabeth… Elizabeth… Elizabeth…"

_Just breathe. In, two, three. Out, two, three._

She straightened up and raked one hand through her hair. The strands snagged on the ring Henry had bought for her forty-seventh birthday, the year after Iran. Another set of anchors, though this time in rose gold. She shook her head to herself and trudged on, and at the prickle of Dr Sherman's gaze at the back of her neck, she said without so much as a glance behind, "Dizzy spell."

A couple of beats passed before Dr Sherman strode to catch up. She walked alongside Elizabeth, and she pivoted back and forth, one moment looking at Elizabeth, the next looking at the path ahead. "And how often do you get these dizzy spells?"

"Only when I haven't slept. Though I don't suppose the caffeine helps." Elizabeth made an attempt at a wry smile, but the effort alone made her cheeks ache, and the smile fell flat before it had even formed. She stuffed her hands back into her pockets and hugged the fronts of her coat around her.

"I know you said you came here to sleep, but that's only tackling a symptom."

Elizabeth turned and arched an eyebrow at Dr Sherman. "I thought you told Henry that lack of sleep could be the cause."

"A cause of some things, a symptom of others." Dr Sherman studied Elizabeth. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and a pinch gripped her brow. "Why did you decide to come?"

"To sleep." Elizabeth shrugged and the fronts of her coat flapped. "And if I was going to end up here anyway, I'd rather it be through my own choice."

Dr Sherman shook her head. "You know as well as I do that I couldn't have compelled you to come here so long as you had someone willing to look after you at home."

Elizabeth's gaze dipped to the white-capped toes of her sneakers, and as her hair swept forward to veil her face, the ghost of Henry's touch brushed the strands back. Or perhaps it was just the chill in the breeze that grazed her cheek. She rubbed her thumb against her wedding ring, and twisted it around and around and around. "Well, I don't anymore, so I guess that doesn't matter now."

"You don't think Henry would come and collect you if you called?"

"If he has any sense, he'll be contacting a divorce lawyer as we speak."

"This seems to be a running theme. Distancing yourself from those who love you, acting as though you don't deserve their love."

Elizabeth stopped. She faced Dr Sherman. "Do I deserve to be loved?"

"Everyone is worthy of love."

"Even people who're selfish? Even people who do nothing but hurt others?" Her voice cracked, and she turned away before the heat could rise up through her neck and blossom in her cheeks.

"Even them."

The leaves of the paper birches that lined the track shimmered, as though the branches were coated in the asynchronous flutter of a million butterfly wings, whilst the wind rustled through them with the mellow rush of water frothing in a stream. Time slowed, and the world around her felt like one of those nature recordings, designed to soothe the mind, and if she could just let it flow through her, it would almost be enough to wash away everything else. Almost.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed back the sting of tears, whilst her other hand clutched her hip. She took a deep breath, and as the wave passed, she sank her hands back into her pockets and turned to Dr Sherman. "Did you know that Henry's father committed suicide?"

Dr Sherman pursed her lips. "I don't believe you mentioned it before, no."

"He had a student who killed himself too. Shot himself, and Henry was the one who found him. Of course Henry blamed himself for both, couldn't sleep, kept turning it over and over in his mind about how he should've seen it coming, berating himself for not having done more."

"So, you think Henry's oversensitive? That he was reading too much into what you said?" Dr Sherman eased a step closer, whilst the cage of DS agents relaxed, though in that enveloping hush, broken only by the wind in the trees, anything more than a whisper rippled out through the night.

"No." The word ricocheted off the slender white trunks. "I think he's spot on. But how was I meant to tell him that? After everything he's been through, after everything he's ever done for me, how was I meant to tell him that I'm thinking all these thoughts? Horrible thoughts, selfish thoughts. And when I did try to tell him and he realised, he looked…" Elizabeth dragged her fingers through her hair, and then gripped the back of her neck. She shook her head as the dismay in Henry's eyes played through her mind again. She stilled, and her gaze flicked up to Dr Sherman. "…heartbroken. Like I had just swooped in and ripped apart his wife right in front of him. And I just wanted it to all go away, I wanted to take it all back."

"But it did go away. When he was speaking with me, he downplayed everything you'd said, he thought he'd overreacted."

"Because he wants this to be just grief."

"And what is it?"

"I don't know." Elizabeth tossed her hand up. "I don't have a clue what's going on. All I know is that my thoughts change faster than I can think them, and then I could hear him talking to you, I could hear him blaming himself for the way that I am, and…and…"

The words spilled up, and then stilled on her tongue as she fought to arrange them into some kind of coherent thought, but it felt like one of those jigsaw puzzles that she and Henry spent their evenings completing, the ones that didn't come with a picture to work from.

"Go on." Dr Sherman prompted.

Elizabeth's gaze sharpened on her, and the gravel beneath their soles infiltrated her tone. "I would never—_never_—do that to him, to our family."

And then the last few pieces slotted into place. "But what if I did?" She winced. "And what if he was the one who'd said that I'd be safe at home?"

A gust of wind whooshed through the birches and ruffled their scrolls of bark, whilst their leaves tumbled like butterscotch teardrops and spiralled down to the track.

"So, that's why you decided to come."

With the cuff of her sleeve covering her hand, Elizabeth pressed the heel of her palm to her eyes, and the moisture beaded like dew on the black wool. "I really am exhausted, and I really do want help to sleep, but I don't want him to get hurt, I don't want him to blame himself if anything did happen."

Dr Sherman held out a pack of pocket tissues.

Elizabeth prised one free from the top. She dabbed at her eyes, and soaked up the buds of tears one by one, and then folded the tissue into her palm.

At Elizabeth's nod, they began to walk again, between the trees and towards the open gates at the end of the drive. The DS agents around them shifted, perhaps only a second or two of lag.

Elizabeth squeezed the tissue into a pulp. "I know you think everyone can be fixed—you have to, otherwise you'd be out of a job—but if I'm broken, please just tell him."

The corners of Dr Sherman's lips quirked, as though she were resisting a chuckle. "I admit that optimism is somewhat of a curse amongst therapists, but I'm yet to meet a lost cause." She turned her face towards Elizabeth and met her gaze. "And somehow I don't believe Henry would give up on you even if you were broken."

Elizabeth bowed her head and frittered away the edges of the tissue so that they flurried like flakes of snow across the gravel. She had seen every hurt look, tensed jaw, worried frown that had passed between them each time she had yelled at him, flinched beneath his touch, pushed him away. Even through the blanket of numbness, they had smarted, like picks driven through a slab of ice. Stevie had once said that he would defend her even if he found her stood over a dead body, and it was true, he would. And she had loved that about him, but now…

Everyone had his or her limit, and wouldn't it be better for him to put his own happiness, and the happiness of their children, first? If she hadn't returned from Iran or Iraq, she would have wanted him to move on rather burden himself with grief, but somehow this, whatever this was, felt far heavier, a load that no one should be compelled to carry, certainly not out of obligation, certainly not because of vows they had made over twenty-eight years before.

She scrunched up the tattered remnants of the tissue and stuffed it into her pocket. She took a breath that shook to the bottom of her lungs, and then she let it tremble out through her lips. "He deserves better. Our children deserve better."

"Better than what?" Dr Sherman looked to Elizabeth.

The sound of their footsteps prickled into the lull as the breeze fell silent.

Elizabeth stopped. Her lips tensed as she met Dr Sherman's gaze. "Better than me."

With that, she spun on her heel, and her stride quickened as she trudged towards the clinic with its red bricks that smouldered against the night, and though she was surrounded, with DS agents on every side, she had never felt more alone, as though a hole had opened in her chest and all the emptiness of the world had rushed in. It echoed of her first night at Houghton Hall, when she had lain awake in the darkness of the dormitory, huddled into a ball with the blanket tugged up to her ears and scratching her cheek, tears rolling over the bridge of her nose and spilling down onto the pillow beneath, whilst the whispers of the other girls spread through the air like an acidic mist. _'What's with the new girl?'; 'How come she's started in the middle of the semester?'; 'Just because she's in our dorm doesn't mean we have to be friends with her.'; 'Cassie said she saw her crying in the restroom during History.' ; 'What a loser.'; 'I say we just ignore her.'; 'Totally.'._

Only this loneliness now felt deeper than before, an ache that sank right into her bones. At least then she'd had Will to share the pain with in silence, as fraught as their relationship might have been; at least then she'd had the comfort of classes and timetables and grades, and she could soothe herself with the semblance of control she found amidst the chaos; at least then she'd had the promise of a life ahead of her to build, plans for a college, a career, a boyfriend, and—one day—a family. But now? Now, she had everything to lose, everything she had worked for, everything she had built, everything she had become since that harrowing day.

At the centre of the car park, the branches of the black walnut tree groaned as they lurched in eccentric circles and the leaves gyred like the thoughts beneath the surface of her mind.

Yes, she had everything to lose. That was, of course, if she hadn't lost it all already.

Dr Sherman aimed her key fob at the car and clicked the button, eliciting a flash of lights and a toot of the horn as the locks clunked off. She popped open the trunk, grabbed Elizabeth's bag, and then closed the lid with a thud that shook up into the air. With the bag held out to Elizabeth, she tilted her head towards the clinic doors. "Are you ready?"

The darkened windows of the upper floors loomed over them like unblinking eyes.

The back of Elizabeth's neck tensed, and she shook her head. "No. Not even close."

She took hold of the leather handles of the bag—her fingers wrapped around them and gripped tight—and she turned towards the SUVs. There had to be somewhere else she could go, somebody she could call, a home she could run to. And perhaps there might have been, were it not for a simple, preemptive phrase. _I'm sorry that I lied_.

She hadn't wanted to hurt him, she just didn't want him to face an even greater pain.

She trudged towards the clinic entrance, but had made it only three paces onto the concrete when beams of headlights bounced off the glass doors. The glare struck her eyes and she recoiled with a wince. Behind her, there came the grating rumble of tyres as a car sped along the track, the noise magnified by its affront on the stillness of the night. She spun towards the car park, just as the DS agents who had stopped by the row of SUVs snapped in around her.

Matt stepped forward, and gestured towards the doors. "Ma'am, go inside."

But Elizabeth stood frozen to the spot.

"Ma'am, we haven't secured a perimeter yet and with the assassin—"

The brakes creaked and the tyres skidded over the gravel as the car pulled to a stop.

Fingers twitched towards holsters, and one of the agents edged forward and shone a torch through the windscreen of the car. The driver lifted his hands from the steering wheel.

Elizabeth couldn't tell what hit her first: panic or dread. The bag dropped from her hand and whumped against the concrete slabs.

"Stand down," she shouted, and when the agents paused for longer than a fraction of a second, she slapped Matt's arm, though not too hard. "Tell them to stand down."

"Stand down," Matt called out, a little half-heartedly, and all the agents fell back, whilst the one nearest the car lowered the torch. Matt turned back to Elizabeth. "Ma'am, until we've established the procedure here, please will you just stay inside."

Elizabeth shifted from foot to foot. The chill in the air felt closer somehow, as though it weren't only brushing against but also rising up from her skin. Footsteps scrunched across the gravel and then clomped onto the concrete. She clung to the ends of her coat sleeves—the only way to still her fingers. The footsteps stopped, and she looked up at him. "What are you doing here?"

Henry's jaw tensed. "You can't say something like that and then just walk out."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, and something inside her chest deflated. She ground the heel of one sneaker against the concrete before she dared to meet his gaze again. "So, what? You drove all the way here to have a go me?"

He frowned down at her. "Of course not. I drove all the way here to give you these."

He unhooked the reading glasses from the front of his charcoal crewneck and then extended them to her, bridging half the gap that strained between them, and when she continued to stare down at the frames, he stepped forward, caught hold of her hand and pressed them into her palm. "I don't care how long it takes, whether you're here for one week or one year, I just want you to feel better, I just want you to come back to me."

She ran her fingertips along the plastic, tentative, as though feeling for bumps or cracks too slight for the eye, and as she did, she soaked up the body heat that clung to the frames. "What if I can't?"

"Since when has there ever been anything that you can't do?"

She looked up at him. "I'm serious, Henry."

"And so am I." He smoothed his palms over her shoulders and down her upper arms. "I don't know what this is that you're going through, and maybe I'll always cling to the hope that it's just grief or lack of sleep, but even if it isn't, people recover." He squeezed her arms and dipped down to keep a hold on her gaze. "I know you can recover, because you never give up without a fight."

And before she could muster a protest, tell him she was too tired to fight, warn him that she would only cause him more pain, his hands fell away and left a chill sharper than before, and he stooped down and picked up her bag. "Now, come on, let's get you checked in before you change your mind."

He held out his hand for hers.

But she continued to worry at the frames.

"Elizabeth?"

The last of the heat sapped away and her fingers stilled. She met him with a small smile. "Thank you for coming." Then she extended the glasses to him. "But you don't have to do this."

He studied her expression for a moment, and the pinch in his brow tightened. His gaze drifted to the glasses. Then he shook his head to himself, and the frown eased. He dumped the bag down and took the frames from her. "You're right, I don't."

And it was better this way, but her heart sank all the same.

She moved to step back, but before she could, she found herself stumbling forward and bracing herself against his chest, dragged towards him by the tug on her coat belt. Her brow furrowed as he opened the front of her coat, just enough to hook the plastic arm over the neckline of her tee.

He looked down into her eyes. "But I want to. And until you tell me that you want me to leave, I'm staying right here with you."

The furrow in her brow deepened, and she winced up at him. "But why?"

"Because you need me, and because I need you." He gave a small shrug, and a glimmer sparked in his eyes. "Or maybe I still have a thing for totally unavailable blondes." He tilted his head to one side, pensive. "Well, one totally unavailable blonde."

A smile escaped her, utterly unbidden.

He matched it with his own. "And I would drive all the way here a thousand times just to see that smile." With a jerk of his head, he beckoned her closer. "Now, come here."

She eased towards him and rested her forehead against his shoulder, and as he wrapped his arms around her and a wave of warmth rolled through her body, the tension that bound every fibre slackened, if just for a second, and she could almost believe that he was right, that all the thoughts that flurried through her mind would go away.

His lips bumped against her crown. Then he drew back and rubbed her upper arms. "Now, come on, let's go inside."

The first set of glass doors whooshed open when she and Henry approached, and a blast of heat spewed out of the foyer. Both walls boasted mirrors that stretched from ceiling to floor and ran all the way from one set of doors to the other; they created a seemingly endless tunnel of reflections. Not infinite like fractals, but recursive. _The Droste Effect_, wasn't that what it was called? Or at least, that's what came to mind, along with Conrad, the fragrance of cherry blossom, and a bench with chipped white paint in the grounds of UVA.

Henry squeezed her hand, and she startled.

On the opposite side of the glass, Dr Sherman punched a number into the keypad on the wall, and the second set of doors slid aside. She looked to Elizabeth, her eyebrows raised. "Ready?"

Elizabeth gave a half-nod—the stiffness in her jaw prevented her from saying otherwise—and with Henry's hand moving to her lower back, she stepped inside.

She followed Dr Sherman along the curve of the reception desk and into the shadows of the corridor. Henry's touch propelled her forward whilst Dr Sherman's voice coaxed her on.

"Amy's waiting for you in the office. She'll be your key worker while you're here. We'll leave the formal intake for once you've had some rest and I've reassessed you, but you'll need to sign a few consent forms before she can show you to your room."

A row of canvas paintings lined the linen-coloured walls; each depicted a different type of flower, their scientific names scrawled in black acrylic underneath. Not dissimilar to the sketches that hung from the walls of their bedroom at home, but the familiarity in such a foreign place stirred a kind of dissonance that simmered in the back of her mind.

"And what about something to help her sleep?" Henry said.

Dr Sherman glanced back and flashed them both a taut smile. "Amy will take care of that." She knocked on a door that had a pale pink placard that declared in white text 'Office: Staff Only'. "I spoke to her earlier, so she's aware of the situation."

The lock turned with a clunk, and a woman with a crop of dark hair and thick-rimmed fuchsia glasses heaved open the door.

"Hi, I'm Amy." She propped the door open with the heel of her trainer, and the reflective strips along the shoe's sides caught the glare of the tube lights. She beamed at Elizabeth and Henry, and beckoned for them to step inside. "Come in, take a seat."

Dr Sherman laid her hand against Elizabeth's elbow. "I'll be in reception if you need me."

Elizabeth paused in the doorway, and as the clack of loafers against the linoleum floor echoed away and Amy continued to smile at her a touch too wide, the sicky feeling at the pit of her stomach sharpened. Why hadn't she kept her mouth shut? Why had she insisted on giving Henry a piece of the truth? It wasn't like she was planning on doing anything. Despite everything, she knew she would never go through with it. She wasn't _that_ bad. Right?

She turned to Henry. "I want to go home."

His lips twinged into a sorry smile. "I want you to come home too. But not like this."

"Henry…" She tugged at his hand. "I'll be okay. I'll get counselling, I'll—"

He shook his head. "No."

"But—"

"Elizabeth, no." He pushed her hand away. "I'm not going to debate you on this."

"Why not?"

"Because I love you."

The words cut through her.

He closed his eyes and took a breath that rippled up into his shoulders, and when he looked at her again, his eyes shone with pain. "What you said earlier, telling me the truth, that was the real you. This right now, this is just fear, and you don't give into fear."

"But what if I want to? What if I've had enough?"

"Then I won't let you." He motioned towards the office. "Now, we're going to fill out the forms and then you're going to get some sleep. Okay?"

The hot roils of nausea grew; they dared her to run, they dared her to fight him or call his bluff. But what if she was that bad, what if she did something, what if he was the one who found her, what if— .

She swallowed back the queasy feeling, and turned to Amy. "Where do I sign?"

Amy stopped staring at an invisible spot on the wall, and darted around the end of the desk. Whilst Elizabeth caught hold of the door and stepped inside—Henry a pace behind—Amy grabbed up the pages spread across the wooden top, jostled them together, fastened them to a clipboard, and then slid the clipboard towards Elizabeth. "There are just a couple of consent forms to say that you're agreeing to a period of observation and to treatment for insomnia, we can fill out the rest later—"

Elizabeth stooped over, plucked a pen from the marble print pot at the edge of the desk, and without so much as a glance at the text, she signed the bottom of the first form, wet her thumb and riffled through to the next dotted line, and then signed that too. She shoved the clipboard back across the desk towards Amy. "Anything else?"

"Just a quick questionnaire, and I'll have to keep your bag in here until it's been searched."

Elizabeth arched her eyebrows. "Searched?"

Amy freed the forms from the clipboard, stuffed in another couple of sheets, and let the clip close with a clack. "It's standard intake procedure, just to make sure you don't have any prohibited items." She held out the clipboard to Elizabeth. "If you could just fill this out. I know it's difficult, but it's important that you try to be as honest as possible."

Elizabeth stared at the page: _Patient Symptom Checklist and Risk Assessment_.

She lowered herself into one of the chairs, and with her elbow propped against the wooden armrest, she massaged her brow, as though trying to dig out the furrows and free the tension that lined their depths. Her gaze skimmed from question to question. The points automatically added up in her mind, and for once she wished she weren't so quick at arithmetic.

She dropped the pen onto the clipboard and looked up at Amy. "Can't I just fill this out once I've slept? Dr Sherman said I would be assessed properly then."

"We like to get a picture of how you are upon arrival, so we can compare your responses in later assessments." Amy sank down into the office chair, and with her hands hidden in her lap, she eased closer to the desk. "I know it's hard, but there's no judgment—"

Elizabeth snorted. "Right."

"—and all your answers are completely confidential."

Elizabeth eyed Amy for a long moment. The girl's look bordered on eager and brushed up against the edge of schadenfreude before she managed to rein it a step back. Though, perhaps that was more tolerable than pity. Elizabeth continued to study her, and then she picked up the pen and lowered her gaze to the questionnaire. The text swam as she held the pen poised over the page. _No judgment. Completely confidential_. But she would see it. _Henry_ would see it.

She lowered the pen once more and tilted her chin to her shoulder. Her gaze clung to the juncture where the skirting board met the cord carpet. "Maybe you should wait outside."

Henry pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down. He covered her hand where it lay against the armrest, and then he squeezed her fingers and dipped to catch her gaze. "Why?"

She tugged her hand free. "Please, just wait outside."

"Elizabeth, you've already told me."

"But this is black and white—" She gestured to the form. "—this is _numbers_, Henry."

"And whatever the number is, it's okay."

"Is it?" She grasped the pen and scored the ink across the page. Slash after slash cut through the boxes. "Is this okay? Or this okay? Or this okay?"

When the last box was checked, she thrust the clipboard at him, and then buried her face in her hand. She waited for the scrape of the chair legs against the carpet, the tread of footsteps fading away, the clunk of the lock, the swoosh of the door, the slam, the silence. The aching silence.

But instead he smoothed his hand over her back in broad circles. "It's okay."

She closed her eyes and shook her head to herself. "None of this is okay."

"Can we have a minute?" Henry said to Amy.

"Sure," Amy said. "I'll go to the pharmacy and get the meds, give you two time to say your goodbyes." A pause followed that weighed down upon the room. "Elizabeth, it's standard procedure for you to remove your laces and any belts, and your jewellery also. If you could just leave them on the desk, I'll pop them in the safe for you."

Elizabeth's grip on her brow tightened. _Really, really not okay_.

"Elizabeth?" Amy's voice again.

Elizabeth let out a terse breath. "Fine."

Trainers padded across the carpet, the lock thunked free, and the door whumped into its frame.

Silence fogged the room. Just a lungful of it was enough to make a person forget how to breathe.

Elizabeth raked her hand through her hair, and then leant down and unthreaded the laces from her sneakers. "I bet you're wishing you stayed at home now."

"Of course not." Henry's gaze prickled over her; it left every inch of her skin feeling raw and exposed. "I just wish you had told me."

She twisted around in the seat and stared at him. "How? How was I meant to find the words to express that?" She yanked the second lace free, and tossed the pair onto the clipboard that lay on top of the desk. "I might have a decent grasp on a few different languages, but even my vocabulary doesn't extend to that."

She tugged the belt of her coat out from the loops and added it to the pile, and then twisted off her rings one by one—each one carrying with it a little piece of herself—and she deposited them with a clatter on the wooden surface. Her watch went next, the last trace of her father, except that which lingered on in Will. _For now at least_. The thought strummed out an ache so deep that it made her whole body hurt. And when she was done, it was more than just her fingers and wrist that felt bare, as though in removing the jewellery she had shed the husk that housed her past, and at the slightest touch all those memories would shiver and then dissolve into empty space.

She traced Henry's gaze to the rings where they lay next to the questionnaire, and then back to the pain that lurked in his eyes. "You didn't sign up for this."

He studied her. His gaze flitted ever so slightly, as though bouncing back and forth between the columns of pros and cons. And she wouldn't blame him if he wanted to leave, if he decided that it _was_ too much for him after all.

He braced himself against the arms of the chair and stood up. "Here."

"Henry…what on earth are you doing?" She swivelled to the door behind them, and then back to Henry as he tugged his crewneck up and over his head and then wrestled off his faded National War College tee. Amy could be back at any minute, and if Elizabeth strained hard enough, she could almost hear the squeak of trainers against the linoleum floor.

"Take this." He held the t-shirt out to her.

She stared at the folds of cotton, and then up at him. "What?"

"Take it, unless you really want to explain why I'm stood here without a top on."

She grabbed the tee from him and clutched it in her lap.

He pulled the crewneck back on, and yanked it down so that the seams no longer aligned with his shoulders and the hem rode up just enough to reveal a glimpse of skin above one hip. Then he turned his chair so that it was facing hers, and he sank down onto the cushion. When she held the t-shirt out to him, still not sure what she was meant to do with it or why he felt the need to remove it, he shook his head. "I want you to keep it."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "So you have something of mine that they can't confiscate."

"But I already have your glasses."

"That's so you come back to me. This is so you know that, right now, I'm signing up for this."

A frown unfolded across her brow. "You're making a commitment to me with a t-shirt?" She shook the material. "Seriously, Henry, a t-shirt?"

"Yes."

Her head fell back, and as she stared up at the ceiling and traced its alabaster swirls, the noise that choked her mind thinned and then petered into silence. "God, you're such a dork."

"But I'm your dork."

And without warning, she chuckled.

"See—" He squeezed her thigh. "—you're still in there."

She straightened up. Her smile softened and then faded into no more than a twinge at the corners of her lips. She plucked at his fingers, and then tangled them with her own and met his eye. "But it feels like I'm drowning."

His own smile dimmed. "I've felt like that before too."

"Really?"

"Perhaps the waters were a little shallower, but yes."

"When?"

His gaze drifted across the room and acquired a distance far beyond those walls. When it returned to hers, he shrugged—the movement forced. "A few times, but definitely after the Marines." He scratched at the back of his head and tousled the already disheveled strands. "Going from being over there one day, fighting for our country, to being back here the next and trying to figure out how to be a husband, the husband you deserved…" His hand fell back to his lap, and his lips quirked. "…it was tough."

Her chest smarted, as though the words had chipped away at their past and revealed a section that was no more than a facade. "You never said anything."

"I didn't want to hurt you, I didn't want you to think that it was your fault or that I didn't love you or that I didn't want to be with you." He rubbed his thumb over the edge of her own. "And it passed. Sure, I had to go on a pilgrimage to get my head around it, but it passed."

"So, what? This is just my pilgrimage?"

"Yes." He gave a blunt nod. "And the thing with pilgrimages is that if you keep placing one foot in front of the other, you always get there in the end."

She tilted her head to one side, and as her gaze sailed away from his, she fought to keep her tone level, but an undercurrent of lightness seeped through. "Not if you fall off a cliff en route."

He grinned at her. "Well, try not to do that. Let's keep this pilgrimage at sea level."

"But then you're back to freak waves and drowning."

"The whole motivational speech thing is a lot easier without hecklers."

The light dwindled. "That's what my head feels like right now. Hecklers."

"Then it's a good thing you've always got an answer for everything."

He eased forward in his seat until he perched at the edge of the cushion, and the closeness sent out alternating waves through her; one warned her to push him away, the next begged her to draw him in, to tell him everything, to tell him every last shred of truth.

He squeezed her hand. "This will pass." His gaze dipped to the plastic frames that hooked over the front of her t-shirt and rested over her heart, and then it darted back to her eyes. "You have my glasses."

She nodded, and with a slight inflection of her lips, she lifted the bundle of cotton still bunched like a security blanket in one fist. "And your tee."

"And my tee." He rose from the seat, cupped her cheek and leant in. He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I love you, Elizabeth McCord, and you are not alone. No matter what the hecklers say, I love you and you are not alone."

* * *

Later that morning, as Elizabeth lay in the cocoon of the single bed with Henry's t-shirt clutched to her chest and the drugs melting through her veins, her mind brushed upon the veil of sleep, but for the first time in as long as she could remember, different dreams awaited her on the other side—to begin with, at least. No darkness. No field. No black walnut tree. Just a tunnel of mirrors. It appeared infinite at a glance, but when she trusted her hand to Henry's and let him lead her down that narrowing track, the walls didn't close in as she thought they would; instead, they expanded until she remembered what it felt like to truly breathe, and as she drew in a breath that rippled all the way to the soles of her feet, the silvered glass around them cracked and then shattered, and everything burst into light before it dissolved into snatches of memories.

Maybe Henry was right, maybe it would pass, maybe there was no other truth that needed to be told. After all, wasn't it he who had once told her that Aquinas quote: _Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine_. Alcohol might be prohibited, and there was only a shower in the en suite, but surely one of the three would be enough, even for a sorrow this deep_._

Right…?

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

(I'll try my best to keep posting a chapter per day—assuming you're all happy with that pace—but hospital appointments might interfere with that plan, so I apologise in advance if I miss a day.)


	31. Chapter Twenty-Nine: silence

**Chapter Twenty-Nine**

**…****silence.**

**Stevie**

**8:33 AM**

"Ugh…Where is it?"

Stevie yanked the patchwork quilt off her bed, and then the duvet too, and she dumped them both in a heap on the floor. The two pillows went next, tossed aside, but they knocked the pink pony her mother had bought her as a child off the mattress, and the soft toy tumbled onto the carpet and landed with its muzzle down, its hind legs in the air.

With one hand steadying her against the mattress, Stevie stooped down, picked up the toy, and then placed it carefully in front of the red glare of the alarm clock on the bedside table. She paused for a second, her hand hovering, and then she stroked the fuzzy strands of its cotton candy mane.

_"__Lost something?"_

_Stevie jumped, and clutched her chest. She spun around to find her mother leant in the doorway, her lips quirked in an impish smile. Stevie's eyes slipped shut, and she let out a sharp breath, whilst her heart continued to thunder away. "Do you have to sneak up on me like that?"_

_"__Can't help it." Her mother untied the running jacket from around her waist; the material rustled and its fluorescent tape threw off the glimmer of a flash in the soft morning light. She slumped onto the end of the bed. "It's all that CIA ninja training."_

_Stevie shook out the pillows over the duvet on the floor and shot her mother a look over her shoulder. "Yeah, well, Dad must have missed that day."_

_"__Your father's not CIA." Her mother's tone was all innocence._

_"__Oh, come on, Mom. Outright lying?"_

_"__What?" Her mother shrugged. "He's not."_

_Stevie rolled her eyes._

_"__So, what've you lost?"_

_"__I've not lost anything." Stevie ditched the pillows. She tugged open the top drawer of the bedside table so hard that it thudded against the end of its runner, and then she hauled open the bottom one too. Nothing. With her hands on her hips, she pivoted around and cast her gaze across the room. "My stupid phone's hiding in here somewhere."_

_"__Stupid phone, huh?" Her mother raised her eyebrows. "I'll remember that the next time you insist on checking it every three seconds at dinner."_

_Stevie shot her another look._

_"__Have you tried the gap between the mattress and the headboard?" Her mother motioned to the top of the bed. "That's where mine always hides…" She stroked her throat. "…either that or the refrigerator."_

_Stevie knelt on the bed and stuffed her hand down into the gap. She ran her hand along from one side to the other until—"Yes! Thank you."_

_She hugged the phone to her chest, and then swivelled around and sat at the edge of the mattress, one leg tucked beneath her. Whilst she waited for her newsfeed to update, she glanced up at her mother, and then frowned._

_A sheen of half-dried sweat clung to her mother's brow and the roots of her hair were clumped and damp, not to mention the slight scent that glowed beneath the mask of deodorant._

_"__Don't tell me you've been out for a run already."_

_"__Bad dream." Her mother stretched her legs out in front of her, leant down to touch the reflective caps on the toes of her trainers, and then massaged her calves. "Thought I might as well get up and make use of the time." She straightened up again and pressed her hands to her lower back. "Besides, barring any international disasters, I fully intend on beating your father in the fun run this year."_

_"__You do know the fun run's not competitive, right?"_

_"__It might not be, doesn't mean I'm not."_

_Stevie scrolled down the screen of her phone, her eyebrows raised. "Well, I'm sure the DS guys are thrilled that you're dragging them out pre-seven AM."_

_"__Maybe not, but on the upside, at least there are far fewer people around to shoot me."_

_Stevie glared at her over the top of the phone. "So not funny." Then her expression softened, and she lowered the phone to her lap. "You know, if you really want to beat Dad, you should take him out with you so you can suss out where he's at, and then you can pretend like you're nowhere near as prepared."_

_"__I like your thinking. Only problem is: your father's a talker."_

_"__A talker?"_

_"__One of those people who think you're meant to talk as you run."_

_"__And you don't?"_

_Her mother's gaze turned distant and the corners of her lips sloped downwards. "Silence is one of many people's biggest fears, but sometimes it's good to stop and listen to what it has to say." She paused like that for a second, maybe two, and then shook off the look. A glimmer lit her eyes again. "Though I can't deny that his idea of a warm down is so much more fun."_

_"__Mom!" Stevie's eyes widened. "Way too much information."_

_"__Sorry." Though her mother's smile said she wasn't sorry at all. "Anyway…I wanted to ask… Have you got any plans today? We haven't done anything as a family in a while."_

_Stevie's mouth tensed. "Sorry, but Tash is in town this weekend, and I promised I'd meet up with her and a few others. Maybe another weekend though?"_

_Her mother's smile slipped, but within a fraction of a second, she caught it. "Sure, no problem. It was kind of last minute anyway." She braced herself against her thighs, and then rose to standing, her gait a little stiff as she walked towards the door. She swivelled back and gestured towards the phone. "I'll leave you to it." And then she disappeared out into the hall._

_"__Mom?" Stevie called after her._

_"__Yeah?" Her mother leant around the edge of the door frame._

_"__Alison was talking about showing you some of the designs she's been working on, so perhaps lock the door if you decided to, you know…warm down."_

_Her mother grinned. "Noted." And as the tread of her trainers faded down the corridor, she called out, "Thanks, Stevie."_

_Stevie shook her head to herself and returned to the phone. "Great, that was perfectly normal, didn't make me sound like a pimp at all."_

"Ugh…Where is it?"

Stevie yanked the patchwork quilt off her bed, and then the duvet too, and she dumped them both in a heap on the floor. The two pillows went next, tossed aside, but they knocked the pink pony her mother had bought her as a child off the mattress, and the soft toy tumbled onto the carpet and landed with its muzzle down, its hind legs in the air.

With one hand steadying her against the mattress, Stevie stooped down, picked up the toy, and then placed it carefully in front of the red glare of the alarm clock on the bedside table. She paused for a second, her hand hovering, and then she stroked the fuzzy strands of its cotton candy mane.

She shook her head to herself, knelt on the mattress and stuffed her hand down into the gap next to the headboard. She ran her hand all the way along until— Nothing.

She let out a groan.

"Looking for this?"

Stevie jumped and bashed her hand against the wood. With her throbbing fingers clutched to her chest, she twisted around to face the doorway. There she found her father, one hand tucked into the front pocket of his jeans, the other holding out her cell phone.

She eyed the phone for a moment as she debated whether to demand that he tell her what he was doing with it or whether to stick to her silence—and hadn't her mother always said how much silence irked him, how after growing up in such a boisterous household he needed all that noise—and so she snatched the phone from him with a scowl and then stalked away to the dresser on the opposite side of the room and jammed the plug of her earphones into the socket.

Besides, what with the concern that etched his face and that brought a whole new depth to the phrase 'worry lines', something told her that somehow, regardless of the hurt that still simmered beneath her skin, silence might just be the safer choice.

"Look, Stevie, I know you're still mad at me about the other day, but do you think maybe we could call a truce? There's something I need to talk to you about."

She zipped up the front of her running jacket, the sound harsh in the surrounding hush, and then stuffed the phone into the pocket. "Do you think DS will let Mom come out for a run? I know they vetoed the fun run, and she probably wouldn't want to do it now anyway, but she needs to get out of the house."

"Stevie…"

She passed the white wire up through the inside of her jacket, and then twisted the buds into her ears. They held silence, though not one tangible enough to cling to. "And don't tell me she needs to rest, because resting isn't doing anything."

"Stevie…"

With one foot propped against the padded seat of the vanity chair, she tugged the laces of her trainers tight and fumbled them into a bow. But her fingers slipped, and she had to start again. "She needs to start doing things, she needs to get back to work—proper work—she needs to get through this, because refusing to talk and just wallowing in this…whatever this is…it's making her worse."

"Stevie…"

"And will you stop saying my name?" She swapped her feet over and yanked the laces of the second trainer even tighter than the first. "Whatever you're going to say, I really don't want to hear it. For the past two-and-a-half weeks, every time somebody's spoken to me, it's just been to tell me how my life is about to get so much worse than I thought it was just moments before."

She tried to stoke the simmer beneath her surface, that potent mix of hurt and anger—anger at her father for shutting her down when she tried to tell him something was wrong, anger at Russell for being right that her mother was struggling and for making vague insinuations about removing her from her post, anger at her mother for not opening up to them and for not doing something to stop herself from slipping further and further into the distance, anger at Uncle Will for not waking up immediately and for not realising how much her mother needed him even if she never said it, anger at the person or people who did this to them and their family all because of some misplaced ideology, and anger at herself—mostly at herself—for not knowing what she could do to help. But as much as fought for a rolling boil, the bubbles refused to rise.

She straightened up, tugged down the hem of her jacket, and forcing a smile that was as empty as it was wide, she turned to face her father. "I just want a nice, normal day. I just want to go out and do something with Mom. I just want you to go away and not tell me why I'm remembering you taking my phone in the middle of the night, or why, when I woke up, I didn't hear the sound of Mom's motorcade, or why you're looking at me with that expression on your face."

Her father offered her a sorry smile. "I'd like that too."

Her shoulders sagged, and she looked at him pleadingly. "Then can't I just stay mad at you?"

"You can certainly try." He gestured to the end of the bed. "Have a seat."

The mattress dipped as she lowered herself onto it, and then further still as her father perched next to her. She unhooked her earbuds and let them dangle over the zipper of her jacket, and she twisted around to face him. "So…" Her lips bunched to one side. "Is it Mom or is it Uncle Will?"

"It's Mom."

Though she thought she had braced herself, everything inside plummeted nonetheless.

And her expression must have dropped too, because he added quickly, "But it's nothing to worry about. She's safe, she just…" He trailed off, rubbed his brow and then let his hand fall back to his lap and smooth along his jeans to clench his knee before he started again. "It became clear that she's been struggling far more than I realised, and we thought—we came to the decision—that it would be best if she got proper help."

"Proper help…as in counselling?"

The silence dragged, and as the seconds passed, her eyebrows arched higher and higher.

"Dad…? She is getting counselling, right? Just like after Iran."

He shook his head, and massaged his brow again. "Her therapist suggested that more intensive treatment might be more suitable at this stage, and I have to agree."

"So…what does that mean?"

"She'll be staying at an inpatient clinic, just for a while, until she's feeling more able to cope."

"Wow…um, okay… That's so not what I was expecting." She rose to her feet, paced away several steps, and tugged down the zipper on her jacket until the earbuds swayed halfway down her thighs. With a heavy frown, she spun back to face him. "So, I'm guessing this is worse than what happened after Iran."

"It's…different."

"Different how?"

"It's just more complicated, because of her and Uncle Will."

Her gaze raised to the ceiling, and she swept one hand over her hair to the knot of her high ponytail. Her palm dragged due to the sheen of sweat that clung to her skin. _Different. Complicated_. Vague words offering no explanation and even less comfort.

Her hand fell back to her hip, and she looked him in the eye. "But if she'd gotten treatment sooner? If you'd done something when I told you?"

With his gaze locked on her, he shook his head, just slightly. "Three days wouldn't have made a difference."

"Then how about two weeks?"

His jaw tensed, and something in his eyes darkened.

"Russell knew she was struggling from day one."

The clench tightened, and his tone strained, as though he were fighting to keep it level. "I know that everyone was concerned about her, but she had to realise for herself that she needed help. You can't force someone to talk when they're not ready."

She clutched her hips, pursed her mouth into a tight bud, and let her gaze drift across the room. It sailed past the trinkets on her dresser, lit by the stripes of sunlight that filtered in through the slats of the blinds; past the mirror, with the curled edges of photographs stuffed into its wooden frame; past the stripped bed and the trace of the conversation with her mother that still lingered from three weeks before; until it landed on the pony, her mother's way of telling her that they'd be moving to the farm, where there'd be no more mysterious 'business trips' and she'd have a real horse to ride.

She took a deep breath, but it sat at the top of her chest and pressed down upon her lungs. "I know you can't make her talk, I just wish someone could've done something more, I just wish that she was fine and that we weren't in this situation now."

"Me too."

She sank down onto the mattress, and curled her fingers over the edge. She turned to face her father. "So, what happens now? When does she go?"

His gaze faltered and then dipped.

The silence on the street outside resurfaced in her mind. "She's already gone, hasn't she?"

He nodded. "She checked herself in a few hours ago."

"Oh."

_How could she not say goodbye? How could she just leave?_

Disappointment weighed down upon her as thickly as it had done when she'd spent her entire eighth birthday waiting at the window by the front door, knelt on a lime green stool with her chin propped against her arms as she watched each car that sailed by, only for her father to come to her at seven o'clock, with the handset of the house phone clutched at his side, to tell her that her mother had missed her flight and that she wouldn't be making it home after all.

But she wasn't eight years old anymore. She was old enough to know that it probably hadn't been her mother on the other end of the phone and that 'missed flight' was most likely code for temporarily MIA; she was old enough to recognise the same look that lurked in her father's eyes, as though each fleck in the hazel were an unspoken fear; she was old enough to know that she wasn't the only one hurting, that she wasn't the only one to feel the way that her mother's absence hung over the air like a wad of cloth soaked in kerosene.

And so she forced her smile a little wider, as though upturned lips alone could lift that burden. "But that's a good thing, right? I mean, she's reached out for help and she'll get the support that she needs and she'll get better. And it's not like we won't be able to visit her, right?"

The silence spun out.

Second by second, her smile waned. "We can visit her, right?"

Her father clutched his brow; his hand shielded his eyes.

"Dad?"

His hand dropped, and he gave a deflated shrug. "Maybe." He opened his mouth again, and then paused. He covered her hand where it rested over her knee. "We just need to let her settle in first, and then we can see how she feels and what her therapist thinks is best for her."

"But why wouldn't they let us see her?"

"Right now she needs to focus on herself and concentrate on therapy."

Stevie frowned and tugged her hand away. "And what? We're a distraction?"

She pushed herself up from the bed, and yanked the zipper of her jacket all the way down until the earbuds hung at her feet. But the air remained close, each breath empty, and as she coiled the wire around her hand, something inside her chest twisted and tightened, like rope straining around the spool of a winch until it creaked. "When you said it 'became clear' that she needed help, that this is 'different' from Iran, that she's 'safe'…what did you mean?"

Her gaze flicked up and locked on her father.

His mouth hung open for seconds so endless that they were impossible to count, and the fear no longer just flecked his eyes but clouded them in a haze. He swallowed. "The main thing is she reached out."

And sometimes meaning wasn't to be found in the words that people gave voice to, but it was hidden in the silence that held the words they chose not to say.

Her lips pursed into a tight bud. "I see." She yanked the plug of her earphones free from her cell phone and dumped them on top of her dresser. With her back to her father, she frowned down at the white wire as the coil she had wound slackened. She cleared her throat. "So, what's the party line?"

A pause. The silence was somehow heavier without the hum of SUVs.

"She's taking personal leave due to an illness in the family."

"I meant: what are you going to tell Ali and Jase?"

When no reply came, she twisted around and leant back against the dresser. Her nails dug into the faded oak, and she gave a stilted shrug. "So, what's the cover story?"

"Stevie, I know this is a lot to take in—"

"Just stop." She pinched her eyes shut and shook her head, her other hand raised.

Minutes might have passed before she let out a huff of a laugh, utterly involuntary, and met her father with a smile so wide that it ached through her cheekbones. "You know, the weekend before this all started, Mom sat right there, where you are right now, and she asked me to spend some time with her, but I told her I was too busy and that maybe we could do it another day."

She swept her hand towards the door. "Next thing I know, she's been poisoned. But through some kind of miracle she manages to survive that, and I think maybe things are going to be okay. But then I'm being told that whoever did this might make a second attempt, or maybe there'll be a copycat, and there's nothing they can do about it, because guess what? The FBI have no leads."

A hot tear spilled down her cheek, and as it lit the anger that swarmed through her veins, she swiped it away. "And now you're telling me that it doesn't matter if there are people out there who want to hurt her, because the real threat's what she might do to herself. But rather than actually respecting me enough to tell me that, instead you make these vague comments about 'keeping her safe', and 'reaching out', and things 'becoming clear', as though I'm not going to figure it out, as though somehow that's going to mollify me."

"I do respect you—"

"Then quit treating me like a child."

"You are a child. Our child. Just because you're an adult now, doesn't change that."

"So, what? You think you can hide me from the truth? You think you can protect me?"

"That's what parents do."

"And if she'd done something, if she'd hurt herself, how were you going to protect me then?"

"I…" He faltered, his tongue poised but empty.

The silence fizzled, as though the air were teeming with static charge, whilst the sunlight that shot through the blinds behind her prickled over her neck and spread its claustrophobic warmth through the back of her running jacket in a wave of nauseating heat.

She pushed herself away from the dresser and strode towards the door. Her whole body thirsted for space, for silence, for fresh air to breathe. Someone should have done something sooner. They should have seen what was happening. Even if they couldn't make her talk, they should have found a way, any way, anything to stop it from coming to this.

"Things will get better, Stevie."

The words jolted up the back of her neck, and she stopped. She turned to her father.

He had risen from the end of the bed, and stood with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his jeans. "I know things feel impossible at the moment, and right now you're hurting, I am too, believe me, but Mom will get better. She'll get through this."

"How?" She snapped. "You just told me that she's _suicidal._" The word came out in a hiss. It left a hollow inside her, and everything around it threatened to cave in. "Do you have any idea how much I've given up to support her? I could be married by now and attending law school, I could be building a life of my own. But instead of the whole career and husband and babies thing that all my friends are so intent on bragging about, I'm stuck being single because any guy I date feels threatened by Mom's position, or turns out to be a spy, or could just be using me as a way to get to Mom. And rather than having a proper job, I'm still working as an intern for a man who thinks I'm incompetent and who hints at his plans to have Mom fired in pretty much every other sentence. But you know what? I made peace with that. I decided that I was happy to support you both, because I realised that the work you do is important, especially Mom, and I thought that perhaps I was helping to build something bigger, that perhaps—despite all her protestations—she'd become president one day. And now you're telling me that, regardless of all the sacrifices I've made—we've all made—not only is none of that going to happen, but that she doesn't even want to be alive anymore. So, tell me, how can things possibly get better? How can they ever be okay?"

Her pulse thumped through her ears, harder than a baseline, and her chest and shoulders heaved with the rise and fall of each breath, whilst something—a scalding something—stung in her eyes and wet her cheeks.

She dabbed at her face and then stared down at the beads of something that had gathered on the cuff of her waterproof sleeve and now rolled away. She frowned. _But, that wasn't right… She was angry. She was definitely angry. Wasn't she…?_

She looked up at her father, as though he held the answer to that, or just the answer to anything at all, it didn't matter. But the world turned watery. Her frown fell away, and as the somethings brimmed over, tumbled from her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, she stepped towards him, flung her arms around him, and buried her face in his charcoal crewneck.

Her father froze for a second, and then— "Hey." His body softened, and he hushed her and stroked her hair, as though she were a child again. And she wished she were, because then such touches would lull her into believing that everything really would be okay.

The scent of her mother's perfume had woven itself into the cotton of his jumper, and with each stuttering breath, the lightness of jasmine both soothed and stung her lungs, and the honey-soft-sweetness of orange blossom both filled her chest and left her feeling empty. She mumbled into his shoulder. "She didn't do anything, did she?"

"No, she didn't."

"But, if she did…you'd tell me?"

He paused, and his body tensed whilst the hand against her hair stilled. Seconds spilled over, until it felt as though he'd forgotten to reply, and then until it felt as though she'd never asked the question at all. But then his throat clunked with a swallow, and he relaxed, if only partly. "I would."

_Good_. She nodded. Though, if that ever were the case, would she really want to know?

She drew back and brushed away the last of the tears. A breath juddered through her upper chest, and she fought to still it, whilst her father watched on with a worried frown. Under the heat of his gaze, she forced a smile and paced backwards towards the door. "I'm okay, really, I just… I could use some air, so I'm going to…" She made a running motion and then gestured to the hall.

His frown deepened. "Stevie, it's okay not to be okay. If you want to talk about this…"

She gave a quick nod. "I know." And, as she continued to step backwards, she fumbled with the zip of her running jacket, slotted the pin into the box and then tugged the slider all the way up to the base of her throat.

"And you don't need to worry about Mom losing her job."

She stopped, and the corners of her lips tugged her smile wider. "Well…Russell was talking about 'taking care' of things when he thought she was struggling, so I'm guessing this news isn't exactly going to thrill him."

"He's the one I called last night when she needed help, he's the one who arranged for her to take leave. Regardless of what he says, he's invested in her."

"Invested…as in…?" She raised her eyebrows at him.

He nodded.

_The presidency._

She tossed her hands up. "Then why didn't he say that? Why did he keep asking people to spy on her, all the while threatening to 'take care' of things?"

He pulled a face and shrugged. "Because he's Russell Jackson. God forbid anything he says or does isn't shrouded in darkness and double meanings." He rubbed his brow and took an ambling step towards her, and then as his hand fell back to his side, he met her gaze. "Look, I know what's happening with Mom is scary, but I want you to know that we both appreciate everything you've done to support us—"

She shook her head and opened her mouth to protest, but he spoke over her.

"—we're aware of the sacrifices you've made, your mother especially, and I can't tell you what's going to happen next, but I don't want you to give up on her."

Her brow furrowed. "Of course not. Never. I just want her to be herself again."

The words hung between them and diffused into the room.

His lips twinged into a small smile. "So, are we okay?"

She nodded. "We're okay."

She backed into the hallway, and was about to turn around when—

"Stevie."

She stopped.

He gestured to the dresser. "Headphones."

She paused and stared at the slackened coil of white wire, and she could already hear the beat that would drown out her thoughts, that would govern her feet, that—for a while, at least—would take away her worries and make the last three weeks fade away. But perhaps that wasn't what she needed, not really.

She shook her head, and flashed him a smile, one with a natural lightness, one that didn't strain or make her cheeks ache. "No, I'm all right." At his bemused expression, she added, "As a wise woman once said, sometimes it's good to stop and listen to what the silence has to say."

He gave a small huff of a laugh. "Sounds like something your mother would say."

* * *

**10:31 AM**

A fresh sheen of sweat broke out on Stevie's forehead as she paced along the corridor of the ICU. She wiped it away with the back of her sleeve, and then peeled off her running jacket and slung it over one arm. After the brisk fall breeze that brought a rasping sting to each breath, the air on the ward hung like a musty blanket, and it weighed down upon her until she yearned for the cold burn of outdoors. How had her mother spent an hour, let alone a whole week, in a place like this?

At the nurses' station, a man in navy blue scrubs leant against the high desk, the white ward phone clutched to one ear. A wisp of recognition tugged at the back of Stevie's mind, but she brushed it away, peered over the top of the desk, and smiled at the nurse on the other side.

"Hi, I'm looking for Will Adams."

The nurse nodded towards the room directly behind Stevie. "Over there. You're family?"

"His niece." Stevie glanced behind her. Or at least she meant for it to be a glance, but her gaze stuck and her smile withered away. The man in the bed beyond the glass was no more Uncle Will than the shell of a person at home—correction: at the clinic—was her mother.

_They're too similar_, that's what her father always said, and perhaps that's what had driven her feet to carry her all the way to her uncle's bedside, as though one Adams sibling could substitute for the other. But if that were her goal, she'd find herself disappointed yet again. Yes, they were _too similar_, but in all the worst ways.

"Miss McCord?"

Stevie blinked and spun back towards the desk.

The man in navy scrubs was looking at her, a nick in his brow whilst a touch of uncertainty clouded his grey eyes. "You are Secretary McCord's daughter…right?"

Stevie nodded. She wiped down her palm against the lycra of her running tights, and then extended her hand. "Stevie." A frown unfurled as she grasped at the recognition thickening in her mind. "You're my mom's doctor, right? We met the night she was admitted."

"That's right. Dr Owens. Jon." He shook her hand, a firm touch that ended in a light squeeze, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with his smile. He tilted his head towards the ward phone, which now rested in its cradle once more. "I've actually been trying to get in contact with your mother, but I only have her cell number, and I can't seem to get through."

Stevie hugged her arms across her chest. "She's actually, uh…I think she's probably just busy. There's been a lot going on." Her frown returned, deeper than before, and her gaze darted to Uncle Will. "Why? Is there something wrong?"

"No, not at all. Your uncle's still stable. I was just hoping for some assistance from the State Department, that's all, but maybe I can try contacting her at the office."

"She's not back at the office yet."

"Still building up her strength?"

She bunched her lips to one side. "Something like that."

"Well, nevermind." He offered her a small smile, and then gathered up the sheets of paper on top of the desk and stuffed them into the manila folder. The label stuck to the upper left-hand corner of the file declared 'Adams, William'. "I'll try and reach out to her deputy instead."

He stepped past her and strode towards the double doors that led onto the ICU. The soles of his trainers squeaked across the vinyl flooring.

It was probably none of her business, she should probably just let him leave, yet before she had a chance to taste the words that formed on her tongue, she found herself calling after him, "Unless you know Deputy Secretary Cushing personally, it'll take you months just to get past his assistant."

He stopped, and turned back to face her.

She gave a stilted shrug. "And that's if he ever gets back to you at all."

"I see." He stared down at the folder in his hand. He frowned. It looked as though he were caught in the midst of an internal debate, presenting both sides of the argument and acting as referee. Then he looked up at her, his expression half hopeful, half pleading. "I wouldn't ask, and I don't want it to seem like I'm taking advantage of your connections, you know, being your mother's daughter…but I don't suppose there's any chance you could put me in touch with someone."

Her gaze flitted to the file. "Is it to do with my uncle?"

He nodded.

"Well, I can't put you in touch with anyone at State, no…"

The hope dimmed.

"…but how about the White House?"

He grinned at her. "That'll work."

* * *

**Thank you for reading and reviewing!**


	32. Chapter Thirty: brutal honesty

**Chapter Thirty**

**…****brutal honesty.**

**Matt**

**Tuesday, 13th November, 2018**

**9:07 AM**

Matt rocked back in the chair and twiddled his biro over the open sheets of the binder as he fought the urge to face-plant the pages instead. Yellow light hummed through the gauze curtains and mingled with the drone of Jay's voice, and as that drone went on and on and on, his eyelids drooped lower and lower and—. He startled as the pen clattered against the desk.

Jay shot him a look, but continued without pause. "…and then the secretary has the call with Minister Avdonin, so we'll need to make sure she's prepared for that. Blake, if you could keep an eye on her, and if she seems like she needs a rest—"

Matt stifled a yawn in his fist, and then snatched up his mug of coffee.

Jay stopped. "I'm sorry. Am I boring you?"

The phone trilled in the corner of the conference room.

Matt swallowed his mouthful of coffee with a wince, and clunked the cup down. "If I answer that honestly, do you promise not to fire me?"

"How about you try taking this a little more seriously?"

"The secretary knows what she's doing. She has done conference calls before, you know."

"Yes, but she hasn't made any kind of appearance in weeks, and after hearing nothing but radio silence for the past three days, I'm not exactly overwhelmed with confidence."

"So, she took a long weekend like everybody else." Matt pivoted back and forth in his chair, and he gave a shrug. "Nothing wrong with that."

In the corner of the room, the phone rattled back into the cradle.

Blake arched his fingers against the desk, pressed his weight into them, and rose from his seat. "Jay… Russell Jackson's on his way up."

Jay swivelled around, and eyed Blake for a long moment. "Did he say why?"

Blake shot him an incredulous look, and then skirted around the end of the desk. "He's Russell Jackson—" With one hand holding the end of his magenta tie flat to his stomach, he leant across the table and plucked one of the croissants from the tray in the middle. "—I'm surprised he didn't just show up unannounced."

Jay flashed them all a grim smile. He spoke slowly, each word falsely bright and over-enunciated. "Who wants a bet the secretary isn't just stuck in traffic?"

"Give her a break, will you?" Matt scowled at him.

Jay stared back at him in disbelief. His tone sharpened. "She's had nothing but a break. For the past three weeks, everyone's gone out of their way to keep things around here running so that she can take time to _process_ or grieve or whatever it is that she's supposedly doing." He chucked his pen down, and as it bounced off the pages of his binder and then rolled across the desk, he scrubbed his face. "I knew we should've gone to Russell Jackson last week."

The room lapsed into silence. It was broken only by the buzz of the outer office, with the lilt of chatter, the clack of heels and the clomp of brogues against the hardwood floors, and the distant ding of the elevator bell. The sounds prickled at Matt, like the words that leapt to his tongue but that he restrained with the cage of his teeth.

He took another swig of coffee. The aroma that had lifted him just moments before now hung stale, and its taste soured in his mouth. How he would love for the secretary to stride in right now, toss her trench coat in Blake's direction, pull up a chair, grab one of the pains au chocolat, and cast them all a look—"_So, what did I miss?_". Partly just to prove Jay wrong. Partly to silence the way that Jay's attitude echoed of his fourteen-year-old self.

The bitterness stewed inside him. It fermented. It fizzled up.

"No, you know what?" He fished his wallet out from his inside jacket pocket and fumbled through the bills. "I'll take that bet. What do you say? Ten dollars?"

He tossed a ten dollar bill down onto the open pages of his binder.

Jay stared at the money, and then up at Matt. His look added to the heat of Kat's, Daisy's and Blake's gazes that already crawled over Matt's skin.

Matt brushed the feeling aside. "Ten dollars says she makes it in for the Avdonin call today."

"Matt," Daisy chided softly, and she sent him a look across the desk. Perhaps it was meant to be pleading, the way she looked at him when begging him not to make a scene, but instead it reeked of pity, as though he were blind to what everyone else could see.

"No." Matt turned his glare back to Jay. Perfect vision. "He thinks this is some kind of game." He plucked a second bill from his wallet and dropped it on top of the first. "How about twenty?"

"Matt, stop."

"Fifty."

Daisy held up her hands, shook her head to herself, and leant back in her chair.

"Fifty dollars." He chucked another ten and a twenty onto the pile. "So, what do you say?"

Jay's gaze lingered on the cash, his expression torn between accepting the bet and upping the ante, and then his gaze flicked up to meet Matt's eye. "I say you're giving your money away."

Matt turned his wallet upside down, and a jumble of ones and fives fluttered out onto the tabletop. "Then stop whining about the fact the secretary's taking some time to grieve, stop telling people she's not fit to work, stop acting like she's a breakdown waiting to happen, and start putting your money where your mouth is."

"Seriously?" Jay arched his eyebrows. "Put your money where your mouth is?"

"Got a problem with that?"

"Oh, for the love of God," Blake said, his voice muffled by a mouthful of croissant. "It's like I'm watching a scene from some am-dram musical. Just take the bet before he goes and cleans out the ATM."

Jay's mouth tightened and he continued to stare Matt down. His fingers drummed idly against the arm of his chair. Then—"Fine." He eased up from the seat. "Fifty it is. But if you really think she's coming into work today, you're just as delusional as her husband."

He flipped the cover shut on his binder and turned towards the outer office, where Russell Jackson strode along the carpeted walkway between the rows of desks.

Matt snatched up the heap of bills that scattered like fall leaves across his own binder, and he muttered to himself, "You say 'tomato', I say 'not dead inside'."

He stuffed the cash back into his wallet, all except for the fifty, which he folded—once, twice—and slipped into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Not that he'd be needing it. But just in case.

Russell swooped into the conference room and arced towards the side entrance to the secretary's office; the open fronts of his suit jacket swung with his momentum. "Anyone who's essential, her office. Now." He paused in the doorway and shot them a glance over his shoulder. "And if you have to ask if you're essential, then that should answer the question for you."

He disappeared into the office, and left the staff to share an uncertain look. Each person's gaze flitted from colleague to colleague in a disorientated pass around the room.

Jay followed first, Kat and Blake next, and as Matt joined Daisy at the end of the line, he gave a shrug. "I always thought I was essential, until the shutdown happened. Now…I'm not so sure."

Daisy pivoted to face him as she filed after the others. "I know you want to stick up for the secretary, but Jay's right. This doesn't look promising."

"I know what it looks like, but that's not the point."

"Then what is your point?"

"I get that her being away from the office is causing problems—" He lowered his voice to a fraction over a whisper as he stepped into the office and then guided the door back into the frame with a soft click. "—but that doesn't mean he should treat this like some kind of inconvenience that needs to be dealt with."

She frowned at him. "But it is an inconvenience." She gave a shrug—_Simple as_—and then she slotted into the semicircle between Blake and Kat. With her hands held in front of her, one loosely clasping the gold bangle and the black leather watch strap on her opposite wrist, she joined the others in looking to Russell Jackson.

Matt remained a step behind, though the distance between him and the others yawned to at least ten times that, and he shook his head to himself. "It is, but she's not."

Russell cast his gaze across the five of them, and lingered on each of them in turn. His voice came sharp, accusatory. "Who among you has either seen or spoken to the secretary in the last twenty days?"

The words rasped through the air, and then faded like sand being blown away grain by grain until they disappeared beneath the toll from the clock on the mantlepiece.

The silence thickened.

Russell's gaze reversed. It swept from Matt to Jay, to Kat, to Daisy, and when it landed on Blake and still no one had replied, he threw his arms wide and his voice strained. "I'm serious. Hands up."

Everyone except Daisy raised a tentative hand.

"Well, congratulations." The tendons in his neck corded beneath the weight of sarcasm. "The whole damn lot of you can pat yourselves on the back. With all your misplaced sense of loyalty, you've succeeded in potentially compromising foreign policy, not to mention other things, so the next time I come to you and ask you if the secretary's struggling, I expect nothing less than brutal honesty. Perhaps then we could have avoided this whole situation." He flung a gesture in the direction of the secretary's desk, and he stared the staff down.

Matt folded his arms across his chest, whilst in the corner of his eye, Blake dabbed spittle from his face and then peered at his hand in disgust. Matt tipped his chin towards Russell, a slight tension gripping his brow. "What situation?"

At the same time, Jay flared his fingers where they rested against the crook of his arm. "I'm sorry, but can we just cut to the part where you tell us what's going on?"

Russell's chest deflated, and as the yellow light that hazed through the net curtains behind him dimmed, he clutched the back of his neck and turned his gaze to the ground. The hint of concern in his expression and the way his posture spoke of defeat made his snarl and his anger look appealing in comparison.

Matt's frown deepened. "Is the secretary okay?"

Russell continued to press his fingertips into the ridges of his neck as he spoke. The words flowed much slower than before, as though he had to drag them up to the tip of his tongue one by one and then shove them over the edge. "The secretary is taking time with her family after her brother's illness—" He paused, and glanced up at them. "—or at least that's what you'll be telling anybody who asks, including your own mothers. In the meantime, Deputy Secretary Cushing will be stepping up as acting secretary until she's ready to resume her post."

Matt eased half a step forward, and shook his head. "That didn't answer the question." His eyes narrowed on Russell. "Is the secretary okay?"

"If the secretary were okay, do you really think I'd be stood here talking to you right now?"

Matt's jaw tensed. "What happened?"

"Nothing, no thanks to this happy family charade everybody seems so intent upon playing."

"Then where is she? Why isn't she coming back to work?"

Russell's chest swelled, and he held the breath there until it seemed as though he had forgotten about the exhalation that was meant to follow. Then he let out a sharp sigh, and he shrugged. "She's at a clinic. She checked herself in on Saturday night."

"A clinic?" Kat said. "As in a psych ward?"

Russell shot her a look that simmered with darkness. "As in a treatment centre for people with mental health problems."

Jay rocked forwards on his feet, one arm still folded across his chest whilst he gestured with the opposite hand. "Look, it's obvious that the secretary has some issues around everything that's happened, and while I'm glad that she's finally getting some help, she's meant to have a call with Minister Avdonin this afternoon, and if she cancels, Russia'll take it as a slight and our BSR deal is as good as dead, and it'll risk putting us on a bad footing with them in other negotiations."

Russell turned the same dark look on Jay. "Then you'll apologise profusely, you'll send the minister a gift basket of mini muffins or vodka or whatever the hell he wants, you'll do whatever it takes to smooth this over and put it to bed like you should've done weeks ago. But you will not be contacting the secretary. Do I make myself clear?"

"It's one phone call."

"Dude." Matt shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and then motioned towards Russell. "Will you listen to what he's saying?"

Jay spun around. "Don't 'dude' me. The secretary requested the meeting herself, and I seem to recall that when I said I didn't think it was a good idea, everyone else in here insisted that I was overreacting, and now that it's been set up, we can't just back out." He turned to Russell again. "Look, the White House were fine with her being in charge on Friday, and you just said nothing's changed, so surely she can spend half an hour talking to Avdonin today, then the whole deal can go through as planned and Cushing can handle everything else."

Russell's cell phone bleeped, and he fished it out of his trouser pocket. With his gaze locked on the screen, his thumb tapping away at the keypad, he said to Jay, "She doesn't have a phone, not unless she wrangles one from her detail, but given that she's currently in a sedative-induced haze, I doubt even she could pull that off."

"There must be a landline she can use, or a laptop for a SVTC call. We'll just push the meeting back until she's had some rest, slept off the sedative and—"

"What did you spend your Saturday night doing?" Russell stuffed his cell phone back into his pocket and stared up at Jay.

"Uh…excuse me?"

"Saturday night, or I suppose more accurately, the early hours of Sunday morning. What were you doing?"

"Sleeping…but what—"

"So was I." Russell's voice grew louder and more strained with each word. "Until I received a phone call from one very distressed Dr McCord telling me that his beloved wife, our dear secretary, who just weeks ago survived an assassination attempt, was having some kind of nervous breakdown and was alluding to the fact that she wanted to top herself."

The room strobed with silence.

Matt felt as though the fifty dollars in his pocket had been turning to coins cent by cent ever since he had stepped into the office, and now, with the full heft of it weighing down upon his chest, it squeezed the breath out of him until he choked on a nervous laugh. "What?"

He must have misheard. The secretary was grieving, she was struggling, but she wasn't…

He silenced the thought. But it was too late. The words had sunk in, like the ink of the tattoo hidden behind the curve of his right ankle, and as they stained his mind, he was transported back to the age of fourteen, back to a place where the only thing that made sense was the need to run. Not physically, of course—with his asthma he wouldn't have gotten far—but a kind of mental retreat sparked by his inability, or perhaps just lack of willingness, to understand.

"Now do you get how serious this is?" Russell stared hard at Jay, and then swept his gaze across the rest of them too. "No phone calls, no running to mommy, no disturbing her in any way. You'll just have to figure this out for yourselves. Do you understand?"

Jay swallowed, the sound thick in the surrounding hush, and he gave a half-nod. "So, I guess I'll be liaising with Acting Secretary Cushing."

"I'm glad we've cleared that up." Russell stared at Jay for seconds that felt as though they stretched into hours, and then, once the darkness in his expression had drained away, he pivoted to look at them each in turn. "Now, who among you speaks German? And I mean fluently, none of that just-enough-to-get-off-with-a-foreign-staffer crap."

Matt inched his hand up.

"Good. Come with me." Russell beckoned him to follow and he strode towards the door.

But Matt remained frozen to the spot. "Why?"

"That's classified." Russell spun around, and as he paced backwards through the shadows of the doorway, he shrugged. "Consider this your chance to make amends…or perhaps just to make things a hell of a lot worse. Now, are you coming, or do I really have to go grovelling to McCord junior?"

And there it was, his chance to run. But the tattoo burned as fresh as it had done when it had first been inked: a reminder that the biggest lessons in life are those that are learnt through pain. He peered at the breast pocket of his jacket, and then untucked the fifty dollars that still hung like a deadweight against his chest.

He looked to Russell. "Give me a minute." Then he stepped forward and tapped Jay's elbow. "Here."

Jay twisted around. His gaze drifted to the folded bills, and a heavy frown descended upon his brow. He shook his head, vehement, and held up one hand. "No. I don't want it, you keep it."

"It's not for you."

"Then…what?"

"Find out where she's staying and send her something from all of us."

Jay rubbed his jaw. A slight grimace contorted his expression. "I don't know… What Russell said's confidential. I can't imagine she'd want us to know, let alone acknowledge it."

"But we do know." Matt thrust the cash towards him. "And she needs to know that we support her. We can't just run away from it."

"Matt's right," Daisy said. "We can't bury our heads in the sand."

Matt sent her a nod, and mouthed, _Thank you_.

He received a twinge of smile in return.

Jay let out a huff. "But what are you meant to send in a situation like this? Seriously, what's the etiquette for a nervous breakdown?"

"It doesn't matter." Matt pressed the money into his palm. "Just organise something. A card or some flowers or…"

He searched the office. His gaze darted from the small wooden box that sat at the front edge of the secretary's desk; to the fawn trench coat draped over the back of her chair, the one she had been wearing that day; to the photo frames that held the pictures of her children and her husband, one in faded sepia from when Dr McCord was in the Marines.

_Henry used to bring me back letters_.

"Hodu-gwaja." It hit him, and his gaze returned to Jay. "She likes hodu-gwaja."

* * *

**Thank you for taking the time to read and review!**


	33. Chapter Thirty-One: fishing

**Chapter Thirty-One**

**…****fishing.**

**Stevie**

**12:01 PM**

"You know, staring out into the corridor every three seconds won't make him get here any quicker."

Stevie jolted to attention, and her gaze snapped from the corridor outside the office—where the stream of staffers carried with them the aroma of coffee, the lilt of their chatter and the hum of microwaved leftovers—to Adele, who sat at the main desk and stared up at Stevie with arched eyebrows.

Stevie offered her a sheepish smile. "Sorry."

She pushed the top drawer of the filing cabinet closed with a thunk, and then slumped into her office chair, grasped the edge of her own desk, and dragged herself forwards. The wheels squeaked and trundled over the carpet.

"What's the concern anyway?" Adele eased up from her seat and folded the cover shut on the binder in front of her. "You've been doing your utmost to avoid him the past two weeks."

"I just wanted to talk to him about something."

Adele slotted the binder onto the end of the shelf nearest the filing cabinet, and shot Stevie a look over her shoulder. "Well, if you're going to ask for time off, I wouldn't waste your breath."

"It's not that." Stevie shook her head. Time off now was the last thing she needed, not when the air in the house had changed, somehow becoming both thinner and heavier, as though stripped of a vital element, one that buoyed the rest and imbued it with a sense of lightness. No—better to keep busy, to find a distraction…or perhaps a way in which she could help.

She looked to Adele again. "Did he say when he'd be in?"

"No, only to move his morning meetings." Adele unhooked her coat from the stand in the far corner, guided her arms into the sleeves and wrapped the folds of slate grey wool around her. "Look, why don't you go for lunch, and I'm sure he'll be here by the time you get back."

"No, I'll wait." When Adele sent her a pointed stare, Stevie motioned to array of files that fanned across her desk. "I need to sort all these out anyway."

"Well, don't complain that you never get a break." Adele stooped down and grabbed the straps of the tan leather handbag that crumpled at the foot of her desk. "And if you do decide to go out before Russell gets back, remember—"

"To lock the door," Stevie chimed along with her. _As if she would forget after last time…_ She matched Adele's soft smile. "I've got it. See you in a bit."

By the time Adele had made it three paces out of the office and merged into the stream of staffers, Stevie's smile had already faded. Five days had passed since she couldn't wait to be out of that door. Five days since she had dashed home to check on her mother. Five days since, _If you lose one shoe, how do you keep going with the other? … God, I can't do this, Stevie._

People always talked about how they _should _have seen the signs, but what if she _had_ seen the signs and had just chosen to ignore them? She had known something wasn't right—that's why she had called her father—but had she known quite how wrong things were? The days since her mother had returned from the hospital played on a loop in her mind, a dissection of each word, each look, each moment. Whoever said hindsight was a wonderful thing had obviously never been in the thralls of its exquisite torture.

Sunlight seeped through the vertical blinds behind Stevie, and though it was as soft as the boundary between fall and winter, it intensified the already stagnant heat that rose up from the radiators so that the air felt like a cloak designed to smother her. She wrestled off her suit jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, and then leant down, unbuckled the clasps of her high heels and kicked the shoes off beneath her desk. The smell of the worn leather insoles drifted into the office.

When she sat up again and glanced once more into the corridor outside, a pang of dread hit her like an ice-tipped arrow through the stomach, and she wished she had thrown herself beneath the desk instead. "You've got to be kidding me."

Her gaze darted to the cubby beneath the desk. _Could she?_

But it was too late.

"Miss McCord." Senator Morejon's drawl unfurled into the smug smile that, like some kind of sonar—_Did weasels use echolocation?_—locked on Stevie. He strode along the veneer of eggshell carpet towards the office, and as he stopped in the doorway and gestured to the files spread across her desk, his smile only widened. "Good to see nepotism at work."

"Ha. Very nice." Stevie forced a smile and tipped her finger at him.

"What can I say? I try my best."

"Well, I'm sure it'll go down well in your next interview."

"Just giving the public what they want."

"Cheap puns?"

His smile turned hollow. "The truth."

"Right." The word dragged and then faded until it died along with any warmth that lingered in his smile, and the room succumbed to silence.

Stevie busied herself with stacking the files on her desk, forming a neat pile and then aligning it with the front edge, though she had still yet to go through them. "Well, I'm afraid Mr Jackson's not in at the moment, and I'm not sure when he'll be back, but if you'd like to make an appointment…" _Or, preferably, just go away and return to whatever hole you crawled out from._

"That won't be necessary." He perched on the corner of Adele's desk, and motioned to Stevie whilst the smile slithered back into place. "Actually, it's you that I came to see."

"Me?"

"I was concerned to hear that there's been an illness in the family, so I thought, while I was here, I'd stop by and see how you're doing."

"Well, as you can see, I'm fine. Thank you for your _concern_…" She leant down and rummaged around in her pink canvas tote until the crumples of tinfoil prickled against her fingertips. "…but if that's all, I'm meant to be on my lunch break."

She dumped the sandwich on her desk and met Morejon with a hard stare.

"Of course." He nodded, though he made no move to shift from his perch.

She unwrapped the edges of the foil and focused her attention on smoothing out the creases, whilst his gaze continued to creep over her, even more nauseating than the heat through the window behind.

"And how's your mother doing?"

"She's fine too, thank you for asking."

"Really?" His eyebrows arched. "Because a little birdy told me that the State Department are about to make a statement announcing that she's taking '_personal leave_'."

She sank her teeth into the corner of the sandwich. Bread and peanut butter clumped in her mouth and muffled her words. "Sounds like you know more than I do."

"Seems very out of character for her. Normally there's nothing you can do to stop her from imposing her so-called 'foreign policy' on our country, but now she's dropping everything without so much as an explanation."

She took a swig of tepid coffee, and then grimaced as she forced down the mouthful of sandwich that lodged in her throat. "As you said, there's an illness in the family."

"Yes." He furrowed his brow in a facade of uncertainty. "Her brother, isn't it?"

"Did your little birdy tell you that too? Or have you just crossed the rest of us off your list?"

"It must be difficult for her. I understand she lost her parents at a young age."

"She has mentioned that in a number of interviews, and I believe it's in her official bio too."

"And now her brother's sick. Terrible." He shook his head to himself, full of faux pity. Then his gaze sharpened on Stevie. "Grief can be a tricky thing."

"It can." She tugged her lips into a smile, and gave a shrug, though a clammy sweat had broken out and crawled across her skin. "Or it can be incredibly simple."

His gaze continued to gouge at her.

And thank God she'd worn a sleeveless dress today.

"How's she coping?"

"Perfectly." She braced herself against the desk, grateful for the air—once warm but now cool in comparison—that brushed against her armpits, and she pushed herself up to standing. "Now, if you'd excuse me." She swept her hand towards the door.

But still he didn't budge, just perched at the edge of the desk with his arms folded across his chest and his lips forever curled in that smile, which even when dimmed, somehow lurked beneath the surface. "Of course, some people can't cope, especially those in high pressure jobs."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"They fall apart, or they start self-medicating."

Stevie hugged her arms across her chest, and her fingertips pitted the flesh of her biceps. "Is that what you do when someone in your family's sick? Start self-medicating?"

His eyes darkened. He drew up from the edge of the desk, and his presence loomed over Stevie. "If something's going on with the secretary—"

"The secretary's fine." Russell swooped into the room, his focus held on the screen of his cell phone whilst his thumb darted across the keypad. "I spoke with her this morning."

Stevie's eyes slipped shut, just for a moment, and a breath trembled out through pursed lips. She'd never thought she'd say it, but: _Thank God for Russell Jackson._

"Russell." Morejon pivoted to where Russell had stopped by the door to the inner office. His smile strained. "Good to see you."

"How can I help you, senator?" Russell slipped his phone into his trouser pocket. "Or are you just here to harass my intern?"

Stevie took a step forward, around the end of her desk. "We were just discussing how Senator Morejon believes that grief can lead to self-medicating."

"Is that so?" Russell raised his eyebrows at Stevie in mock interest, and then he returned to Morejon. "Well, that's certainly an interesting theory. Though I'd be careful if you were thinking of concocting a case study. I hear peer reviewers are sticklers for detail, almost as much so as the guys over at USCIS." His gaze flitted up and down over Morejon. "Something to bear in mind."

Morejon's jaw tightened, and his hands found his hips. "Is that a threat, Russell?"

Russell paused, as though considering that for a second or two, and then he pulled a face and shrugged. "I suppose that's up to you. Good day, senator."

He tugged open the door to his office, and strode inside. Stevie kept her gaze on Morejon as she padded across the carpet and hurried after Russell. The fibres bristled against her bare toes.

The door shut with a clunk. Russell pulled off his suit jacket and flung it over the back of his chair, whilst Stevie eased closer, step by awkward step, and then stopped behind one of the cerulean armchairs in front of his desk. She curled her fingers over the back of the cushion, and dug her nails into the polished leather. "He doesn't know anything, does he?"

Russell glanced up at her. "If he had even the slightest clue what was going on, do you really think he'd be snooping around here when he could have every news outlet in the country with him front and centre?" His gaze drifted past her, towards the door. "No, he's just fishing."

She gave a small nod, but her fingertips continued to pry and pluck at the cushion.

With a heavy sigh, Russell sank down into his office chair. He wheeled the chair up to the edge of the desk and then dragged the stack of manila files that rested in his in-tray towards him. He lifted the cover of the uppermost one, scanned halfway down the first page, and then leafed to the end, snatched up a pen, popped off the cap, and scrawled his signature across the bottom. He tossed the file aside, and grabbed up the next one.

"So…" Still clinging to the back of the chair, Stevie rocked forward onto the balls of her feet and then back to her heels. "…how is my mother?"

"Don't know."

She frowned. "But you said…"

"I lied."

"Oh."

Russell paused, the nib of the pen poised over the page, and he stared up at her. With his eyebrows ever so slightly raised, his expression softened. "Look, she's going to be okay… okay?"

Stevie's lips bunched to one side. "You don't have to try and protect me."

His gaze returned to the file. "I'm not."

"Right." She followed the sweep of his pen across the page, and her grip on the back of the chair tightened. "It's just, my dad told me what happened, well not exactly what happened, but I get the gist of it, so if you were trying to shield me from anything…"

"I'm not."

In the silence, the scrabble of her fingernails against the leather prickled out in a pattering staccato over the scrape of the nib across the paper, whilst beneath it, the toll of the grandfather clock clunked in time with every other beat of her heart, and just like the pulse in her ears, that clunk grew louder and louder.

Russell stared at her fingertips, and she stopped. He dragged his gaze up until it met her apologetic wince. "Look, you don't need to worry about your mother. She's safe, and the last I heard, they've got her snowed under."

"Is that meant to be reassuring?"

"They know what they're doing." He recapped the pen, and then rested his elbows against the desk and held the pen like a bridge between his hands whilst he studied her. Seconds lapsed before he gave a half-shrug, stilted. "If you need to take some time—"

She shook her head, and the strands of her hair whipped across her face. "No, I'm fine."

He continued to stare at her.

"Really." She forced a smile, but still she clung to the leather.

He eyed her in a way that made it feel as though his look were a scale and somehow she was being measured. But then his gaze snapped into focus, and he gave a curt nod. "Good. Then stop clawing apart my chair and get back to work."

He returned to the file in front of him, and she let her hands slip away from the armchair, so that they hung empty at her sides—but only for a second before they came together and she fumbled over her fingers instead. She backed away a couple of paces, the carpet cool against her soles, and then she turned and padded towards the door.

Two strides from the exit, she stopped. She still hadn't asked him, she still needed to know.

"You're hovering." The words grated across the room.

"Sorry… It's just… My uncle's doctor…"

"Dr Owens?" Russell capped his pen and chucked it down onto the desk. "Yes, we're acquainted." He eased up from his seat, and then grabbed one of the bottles of mineral water from the mini refrigerator that stood against the far wall. He twisted off the plastic cap and raised the bottle to his lips, his gaze never leaving hers. "I wonder how on earth he managed to get hold of my personal number, and on a holiday weekend no less."

A crest of warmth crept up Stevie's neck. She shifted her weight to the outside edge of her feet, whilst her fingers tangled together in front of her. "Sorry. Was your wife mad?"

"Working on what was meant to be a weekend off? She was positively delighted. Though I guess all thoughts of a relaxing weekend were thrown out the window when I got that call from your father. I'm beginning to wonder if you McCords are really worth the trouble."

"You hadn't thought that already?"

His lips flinched, the flicker of a smile. "It might have crossed my mind." He sank back into his seat and downed another gulp of water. "So, in answer to your question, or what I'm assuming your question would be if you ever got round to asking it, yes, I spoke to Dr Owens."

"And…?"

"And I've handed it off to State."

She ambled a step and a half closer. "But, do they think they can wake him up? My uncle."

"They're looking into it."

A spark lit in her chest. If they could wake up Uncle Will, if he would just get better—

"But don't get your hopes up." The plastic bottle crackled beneath Russell's grip as he lowered it to the desk.

Stevie frowned, the spark extinguished. "You don't think it'll work."

He shrugged. "I don't know, I'm not a doctor." Then his expression sobered, his gaze locked on hers. "But I know this: It won't fix your mother."

"But, if he wakes up—"

He shook his head. "Don't do this to yourself, Stevie."

"Do what? I just want to help."

"Trying to fix him, blaming yourself…ringing any bells?"

Stevie paused, her lips pursed into a bud. Then it hit her. _Her_ _mother_. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head, hard enough to bat away any suggestion. "Oh…I'm not…"

"And let's keep it that way." He arched his eyebrows at her, and his gaze bored into her, as though to chip the message into her mind. "Everyone wants to see your mother get better…well, most people do…or at least the ones who matter… But she's not your responsibility. If you want to help her, just take care of yourself. Okay?"

Stevie nodded. Though nothing about that felt okay, not right now anyway. Sitting back and doing nothing, refusing to acknowledge what was right in front of her… Wasn't that how they ended up in this situation in the first place? But being active, looking for a solution… Couldn't that hold the answer?

She chewed on the inside of her cheek and crept another step closer. Russell had returned to the stack of files, but the slight hunch in his shoulders—and the fact that he was Russell—suggested that he was mindful of her gaze. "How did you know something was wrong with her?"

The pen paused, no more than half a second. "Unlucky guess."

"My dad said that you're _invested_ in her, that you want her to run for the presidency."

"He's awfully chatty, your father."

"Do you think she can do it?"

"Have you met your mother?"

"Even now?"

He stopped and looked up, but his gaze sailed far past her. "That's up to her. Sink or swim."

The words loomed over the room, as ominous as black clouds on the horizon.

A knock shook through the door, and Stevie jumped.

Before Russell had a chance to call out, the door swung open and Mike B strode in. "We need to talk." Then his gaze landed on Stevie and he grinned. "Hey, it's the eldest one. I hear your mom's gone all '_One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_'."

The back of Stevie's neck bristled. "Seriously?"

Mike gave her a look. "Seriously_._"

"Yeah, well…" Stevie stumbled whilst the bristle turned into a burn that flushed through her cheeks. The words fumbled their way up and then spat from her mouth. "…well, the seventies faxed and they want their reference back."

Mike's grin stretched even wider. "Nice. Reaction time definitely needs some work, and I was of course referring to the 1962 novel upon which the film was based, but keep practising and you'll make a half-decent Bess yet." He squeezed Stevie's upper arm, and then turned back to Russell. His expression sobered. "As I was saying, we need to talk."

Stevie stepped through into the outer office, and guided the door shut behind her. It thunked into its frame. She let go of the handle, but rather returning to her desk, to the cold coffee and half-eaten sandwich, she leant against the cool wood and let her head fall back. Sunlight still unspooled through the vertical blinds and lit hazy lines across the floor, and the warmth tingled through her toes, both from the light itself and from the heat that had been absorbed into the carpet.

_Sink or swim. It's up to her_. Her mother had to get better, even if Uncle Will didn't wake up, she had to get through this. She knew her mother, she knew that she would recover, she knew that she would return to the woman she was before. But then again…

Something needled in the back of her mind, like the way the soft warmth of the sunlight no longer soothed but now prickled over her skin. When so much of her mother's past—and present—was classified, wrapped up in necessary or self-imposed covers, how much did she really know? After all, five years ago, she had never for one moment thought that her mother would be secretary of state, let alone being groomed for a White House run. More to the point, she had never for one moment thought her mother would get ill, not like this. _That's what parents do. They protect you_. From truths, from pains…from facets of themselves?

The door juddered behind her, and she leapt out of the way.

"Stevie." Russell leant through the gap. He massaged his brow, his fingertips digging into the grooves. "I need you to clear my schedule. Now. And contact Director Doherty and Director Ware. Tell them I need to see them. Urgently."

* * *

**Thank you for your reviews and positive vibes! They are much appreciated.**


	34. Chapter Thirty-Two: this is where the

Note: I'll admit to a degree of difficulty when writing Mike from Conrad's POV, so I hope this works...

* * *

**Chapter Thirty-Two**

**…****this is where the iguana comes in.**

**Conrad**

**Thursday, 15th November, 2018**

**9:31 AM**

The door to the Oval Office swung open before Conrad had time to register the _rap-tap_ of knuckles against it, let alone beckon anyone to enter.

"Morning, sir." Russell strode inside, his gaze buried in his cell phone, a stone blue manila file pinned to his side beneath his elbow, whilst Mike B trailed less than half a step behind.

"Russell." Conrad's brow furrowed. He braced himself against the desk and pushed himself to standing. "What's going on? I'm meant to have a meeting with Gordon in five minutes."

"Sec Def can wait." Russell slipped his phone into his jacket pocket, and as the thunk of the door slotting into the frame echoed through the pause, he stopped in front of the desk and looked up at Conrad. Mouth open, he drew a breath. "There's been a development."

"What do you mean 'a development'?"

Russell opened the file, and balancing it in one hand, he pulled out a single sheet of glossy paper with a crisp swish and pushed it across the desk. His fingertips lingered at the edge of the sheet for a moment, as though he were hopeful that they might be able to soak up the ink and make the image fade to white. Then, when the seconds had passed and nothing had changed, he tapped the page, smearing the faint whorls of fingerprints that he left behind, and he withdrew his hand.

Conrad hesitated. He dragged the picture towards himself. The light from the chandelier that hung at the centre of the room cast yellow dapples across the surface of the paper, and the sheet scraped over the oak. He frowned down at the image, and then up at Russell. "What is this?"

"This—" Russell rubbed the trenches of his brow. "—is a photograph of Elizabeth taken in the early hours of Sunday morning." His hand fell back to his side, and his shoulders deflated. "Just as she was leaving for the clinic."

Conrad sank into his seat. He held the picture by its margins, so that the back of the sheet rested against the lip of the desk, and his frown both deepened and softened as he studied it.

Yes, it was Bess. Though not as he knew her, or at least not as he'd seen her in a long time. Huddled in a black woollen coat that could have been made for someone twice her size; her hair half falling across her face and fully dishevelled; whilst beneath the amber glare of street lights, her cheeks appeared a touch too hollowed; and her eyes…her eyes…well, gaunt didn't quite cut it.

His lips tensed, whilst he fought to still the currents that seethed like rapids beneath his surface. "Somebody's been watching their house."

A pause, weighed down by the gloom that seeped past the gauze curtains.

Russell's mouth hung open and his gaze flitted over Conrad. He gave a slow nod. "Yes, sir. I think it's safe to say that's a fair assessment."

"And I take it from the fact that you're presenting me with this, not to mention the sheepish looks on both your faces, that DS failed to notice."

Russell cast Mike a sideways glance, though Mike had found fascination in a spot on the carpet, not far beyond the ends of his shoes, and then he returned his gaze to Conrad. "Yes, sir, that's correct."

"Well, what if whoever took this—" Conrad gestured to the photograph. "—had put their camera down and tried to do something? Would DS have noticed then?"

"You'd certainly hope so. Though I'm beginning to have my doubts."

"And what about now? Have they tracked her to the clinic?"

"DS insist they weren't followed—"

Conrad drew his chin in. The sarcasm flowed thick. "Well, if DS insist."

Russell's voice strained, whilst one hand motioned as though to tamp down Conrad's response. "—and there's been no suspicious activity. But I've put her security on alert in any case."

Conrad glowered at the photograph. His tone softened, but his hand continued to open and clench in a fist where it hung over the edge of the armrest. "She's in a clear line of fire, for God's sake. We promised we'd keep her safe."

The air pulled taut with silence, like a hide being stretched over the shell of a drum, until it felt so tense that the trill of the phone from the office outside bounced off it. She should never have been put in this position in the first place, and they certainly shouldn't be three weeks on and still have her facing the same threat. Wasn't it enough that she thought—

Conrad shook his head to himself and let out a stream of breath, though the frown that had settled on his brow refused to budge. He looked from Russell to Mike and back again. "Where did the photograph come from anyway?"

Russell gave Mike a half-nod, as though to nudge him forward. After a moment's pause, Mike gripped the back of the chair that stood at the edge of the desk; he stepped around it, unbuttoned the front of his tweed jacket, and lowered himself onto the cushion. He leant forward, his eyes wide. "A few days ago, I received a tip from a contact of mine that the image was floating around the sewers of journalism with a fairly hefty price tag attached to it."

This time, Conrad's fist failed to open from its clench. "Tell me you've taken care of it."

Mike glanced over his shoulder at Russell, and then returned to Conrad. "Fortunately the price itself seems to have acted as enough of a deterrent."

"So we looped in the FBI and set up a purchase." Russell prised back the cover on the file and leafed through the pages. "That enabled us to get a hit on this guy."

The scrape of paper against paper cut through the office as he pulled out a second sheet. He slid the photograph across the desk, so that its edge aligned with the one of Elizabeth.

Conrad gave the image a cursory glance, and then looked back to Mike as Mike took over again. "Some lowlife blogger with an axe to grind against Bess. We've waded through the posts on his so-called news blog, and to cut a very long and very repetitive story short, he's not her number one fan and one of his favourite pastimes is griping about her policies."

"And do we think he could be connected to the assassination attempt?" Conrad said.

Russell shook his head. "Not directly. He doesn't like her very much, but not enough to want her dead. Plus, his alibi checks out."

Conrad rubbed his jaw, and his gaze slackened for a moment, until the photographs on the desk faded to a haze and the stripes of the wall merged into one another, a backdrop of beige. No matter how disconcerting it would be to learn that such a man, a lowlife, a nobody, could get to Elizabeth, somehow it would be reassuring to know that he was the one who wanted her dead. At least then this would be over. Or, at least, a part of it would. It wouldn't resolve what was happening to Bess now, but it would perhaps give her and her family some relief, and it would give her the privacy that she needed. _Privacy_…

His gaze darted up to Russell again, still stood in front of the desk. "What about other copies? If the press or anybody else get their hands on this—"

"We're keeping an eye out," Russell said, "but so far it doesn't look as though anyone's touched it."

Mike twisted back to Conrad and nodded. "Thanks to the tip off, we managed to get in there pretty quickly."

"Though perhaps not quick enough to stop Morejon getting a whiff, if his comments the other day are anything to go by."

"I'm surprised he didn't buy it himself and plaster it all over Twitter." Mike batted one hand.

"If he did that," Russell said, "he knows there'd be hell to pay."

Conrad arched his eyebrows. "Do I even want to ask?"

"Not if you want plausible deniability, sir."

Conrad's lips twitched, though the smile was a ghost before it had even formed. He ran his fingers along the edge of the photograph, the one of Elizabeth. "If this _blogger's_ goal was to discredit Bess, then why not just post it? Why try and sell it?"

"It seems as though that was his initial intention," Russell said. "When the FBI searched his laptop, they found a draft post entitled 'Secretary of Unfit Mental State'."

Conrad let out a huff. "Catchy."

Mike shrugged. "It's no 'Madam Sexytary' or 'Secretary of Escape', but I suppose it does have a certain ring to it."

"So, what made him change his mind?" Conrad said.

"Apparently, being the so-called harbinger of truth doesn't pay that well, especially seeing as advertisers aren't too keen on supporting the blogs of DC gutter-dwellers and conspiracy theorists, and like the rest of us, he's got bills. So, he thought it would be more profitable to sell the image instead." Mike's nose wrinkled, and he tossed up one hand. "Plus his pet iguana got sick, and vets are ridiculously expensive."

Russell leant back against the arm of the couch, and with his arms folded across his chest, he gave a half-shrug. "Can't hurt that it would save him the damages in a libel case too."

Mike pivoted to face Russell, one finger raised. "Though, technically not libel if it's true."

"He didn't know that." Russell's voice soared. "All he's got is an image of her looking a hot mess—" He flung a gesture towards the photograph. "—and he's certainly not a psychiatrist, though he probably ought to be acquainted with one." He shook his head to himself, and added in a mutter, "Probably thinks the DSM is some kind of sexual fetish."

Mike smirked. "Throw in some handcuffs and a couple of ties, and it would be."

Conrad held his hand up— Stop. Now. Before they ventured down a path he really didn't want to go down. "But how did he know to watch her house? You can't tell me that he just happened to be passing by at the precise moment she was leaving for the clinic."

"After some quaint protest about his human rights—" Mike twisted around and wrinkled his nose at Russell. "Why do people always go there, by the way?" He turned back to Conrad. "—the FBI read him the list of charges he'd face, and that got him talking."

"He claims he didn't take the photo," Russell said. "Apparently it just appeared in his inbox one day, sent from an anonymous email address no less."

Conrad's brow crumpled, and he shook his head. "I'm not buying that."

"Nor did the FBI. But it turns out he has a history of delving into the murky depths of the dark net, so the FBI thought maybe he stumbled across some communications while trawling for God knows what else."

Conrad paused. His frown deepened. _Dark net. Communications_. His gaze sharpened on Russell. "So, they think the photograph is related to the poisoning after all?"

Russell nodded. "That's their working theory, and they suspect it's not the only image out there. It might be that they're drifting around the dark net—the FBI are looking into it—but that's not where it turns out this guy got the photo from."

Mike had been watching Russell, but he turned now to Conrad, and his face lit up with such delight that he might as well have been a child at Disneyland on Christmas Day beneath the pink glow of fireworks. "This is where the iguana comes in."

Conrad sent him a questioning look. "The iguana?"

Then his gaze shifted to Russell as Russell began to speak.

"While the FBI were digging into his online activity, they also searched his home. There's no trace of this mysterious email, as we suspected, and there's nothing incriminating at his flat."

Mike's gleeful look persisted. "But then one of the agents remembers the story about the sick iguana, and decides to go check on it."

"And…?" Conrad looked between them, his eyebrows raised.

"Turns out the iguana's twitching, so he's not lying about that."

Russell furrowed his brow and cast Mike a dark look. "But more to the point, they found a USB stick hidden in the terrarium."

"But not just any terrarium, but a terrarium that takes up half of his bedroom." Mike grinned at Russell. "Now that's got to be some kind of fetish."

"Let me guess." Conrad gave a wry smile. "The image was on the USB."

Mike nodded. "Along with pictures of Bess's shrink, taken the same night."

Russell balanced the manila folder on top of the couch and thumbed through the remaining pages. "When the FBI confronted him about it, he said someone had left it for him in a coffee shop. He went to relieve himself and there it was there, next to his coffee, when he got back."

"And CCTV?" Conrad said.

"Shows the drop off. Led us to this man." Russell pushed himself up from his perch and slid a third photograph across the desk.

"He styles himself as some kind of freelance photographer," Mike said, "but he has an impressive rap sheet and some pretty shady clientele."

Conrad looked to Russell. "And have the FBI questioned him?"

"Picking him up as we speak."

Conrad leant back in his chair. He studied the three images in turn, lingering longest on Bess, the photograph stuck in between. The tension in his brow grew, along with the niggle at the back of his mind. "But why give the image to a blogger? Surely the assassin wouldn't want this to get out."

Russell shrugged. "It's possible that the photographer went rogue."

"Or that they instructed him to release it in order to flush Bess out." Mike leant closer and arched his hand atop the desk. His eyes gleamed, alight with conspiracy. "Imagine if the blogger's iguana hadn't gotten sick and he'd decided that, rather than trying to make a quick buck, he'd go for the full exposé. Once the mainstream media got hold of it, the story would've blown up, and it wouldn't have taken long for someone to identify Bess's shrink and track Bess down at the clinic."

Conrad pursed his lips. "Use the story as bait." He arched his eyebrows at Russell. "Sounds like they've taken a leaf out of your book, Russell."

Mike nodded, and a smile lit his face. "Nefarious minds think alike."

"But why go to the hassle? Why not just track her down themselves?"

"I agree," Russell said. "It's too noisy. With the first attempt, they came and went unnoticed. Even with our top resources on it, we turned up nothing. It seems more likely that with Bess keeping a low profile and with the increase in her security, they decided a second attempt was too risky."

"So, we're back to discrediting her instead?"

"With jerks like Morejon champing at the bit to call her a junky or an alcoholic, it wouldn't take much to stir up a scandal. It wouldn't kill her, but it would still silence her." Russell's shoulders rose and then slumped. "Maybe that's all they ever wanted to achieve."

Conrad's lips tugged into a line. "And even if we did somehow trace it back to them, it would've been too late."

"Plenty of presidents have had their issues, but I can't see it going down well with the electorate, not after every commentator out there has put their own sordid spin on it."

"It's all about the optics." Conrad shook his head to himself. _Why did he ever get into politics?_ He looked to Russell again. "I trust you're coming up with our own way to spin this, if and when the time comes."

Russell's gaze dipped to the floor. He scratched the back of his head and let out a terse sigh. "That won't be an issue, sir, if Bess doesn't start playing ball."

A frown descended on Conrad's brow, but before he could ask the question, Russell's cell phone buzzed and bleeped.

Russell patted down his trouser pockets before he fished the phone out of his suit jacket. His expression hardened as he stared down at the screen. "That's Doherty now." He jabbed the answer button, and then turned his back on Conrad and Mike, paced towards the grandfather clock by the door and raised the phone to his ear. "Talk to me."

He stopped and stood perfectly still.

The _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the clock engulfed the room.

Conrad waited. Each juddering strike spawned a fresh wave of unease. He had gotten away. The photographer had gotten away, hadn't he? And they were back to square one. The assassin still out there. God knows how many images waiting to be released. What would happen to Bess then? How much more would she be dragged through before—

Russell spun back to face him, and covering the mouthpiece, he gave a nod. "We've got him."

"We have?"

Russell nodded again. "They're bringing him in for questioning."

Conrad's eyes slipped shut, and he let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. His grip on the arm of the chair eased. "Thank God for sick iguanas."

Russell pocketed the phone. He snatched the folder from the back of the couch, and then darted forward and gathered up the photographs from the desk. "I'm going to head down there now, make sure they don't mess up this lead." He jostled the photographs together and stuffed them into the file. "I'll keep you posted."

"Tell them to lean on him," Conrad said as Russell strode towards the door. "Whatever their intentions, I want everyone connected to this brought into custody before they even have the chance to think about trying something like this again."

Russell tipped the file towards him. "Will do, sir."

"And don't be afraid to threaten him."

Russell cast a look over his shoulder as he tugged open the door. "Trust me, by the time I'm done with him, jail time will sound like a mercy."

The door clunked back into its frame, and a silence settled over the Oval Office, thick with the aroma of coffee that percolated through the air of the White House, a lifeblood of caffeine. Outside, the Secret Service agents paced along the stone walkway, and though their steps were soundless, it felt as though the pulse of their stride echoed through the room, as subtle as the tides of relief.

Mike turned to face Conrad, and as he clasped his knees, a smile spread across his face. "So, Bess has gone round the bend. Who'da thunk it?"

Tension radiated along Conrad's jaw, and he shook his head. "Don't go there, Mike."

"Come on. You must've had an inkling, what with all that CIA voodoo knowledge."

Conrad placed his palms flat against the desk, and he eased up from his seat. He towered over Mike, and shot him a look. "Sometimes I wonder why Bess tolerates you."

"I like to think she finds me refreshing."

Conrad let out a huff of a laugh. "Is that what you call it?"

Mike's smile lingered for a few seconds, and then faded, and his expression turned pensive. He looked up at Conrad, a sight nick in his brow. Perhaps the closest thing to concern Conrad had ever seen from him. Until—"Why do people keep pet iguanas anyway?"

Conrad jabbed the intercom button on the phone, and three seconds later, Lucy opened the door. Conrad swept his hand towards the exit. "Goodbye, Mike."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Thoughts are always appreciated. : )**


	35. Chapter Thirty-Three: privacy

**Chapter Thirty-Three**

**…****privacy.**

**Henry**

**Saturday, 17th November, 2018**

**10:13 AM**

Sunlight spooled in through the window of the spare room and illuminated the motes of dust that spiralled through the air, but as Henry ended the call and placed his cell phone—(the upgrade he'd been wanting, the upgrade he wished he'd never needed)—down on the window sill, the beams carried with them more chill than warmth.

"So…what did they say?"

Henry's heart lurched, and he spun around.

Jason leant in the doorway, his arms folded loosely across his chest and crumpling the open fronts of his plaid shirt.

"Hey, Jase." Though Henry's heart continued to pound, he tried to pass it off with a smile. "I didn't see you there."

He picked up the fitted sheet that was folded into a sort of square at the end of the bed, and he flicked it out so that it billowed like a market stall canopy caught in the breeze. It released a waft of laundry detergent, a sting of synthesised lavender.

"Give me a hand, will you?"

But Jason didn't budge. "What did they say?"

"What did who say?" Henry tugged the corners of the sheet over the edge of the mattress one by one. His back ached as he stooped down.

"Come on. I know you call them every morning."

Henry glanced over his shoulder. "Call who?"

Jason gave an exaggerated eye roll. "The neural health facility."

Henry chuckled and he smoothed out the non-existent creases in the sheet. "Is that what we're calling it now?"

"Thought that was more PC than nuthouse or asylum."

Henry shot him a look. He chucked a pillow at him, followed by a second. "Do these." He pointed to the pillowcases that rested on the wicker chair in the corner of the bedroom.

Jason grumbled, but he trudged into the room, snatched up the pillowcases and slumped down into the seat. The wicker creaked beneath his weight. He stuffed one pillow into its cover, and then wedged it by his side and grabbed the second from where it rested between his feet.

When the pillows were done, he chucked them back at Henry. "Seriously though, how is she?"

"She's fine." Henry plumped up the pillows. A faint mustiness bloomed from them, a reminder of how infrequently they had guests. Then he set them at the top of the bed.

The wicker squeaked as Jason eased up from the chair. He sidled closer to the bed, and his arms came to rest across his chest once more. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper as he shot a quick glance towards the door, towards the hum of the television and the thump of footfall against floorboards that drifted up the stairs. "Look, I get that you don't want to scare the girls, but I know why she's there, so you don't have to try and protect me."

"She's fine, Jase." Henry cast him another look, and then fed the corners of the duvet into the teal-and-pink-chequered cover. He held the duvet up and shook it out until the opening in the cover fell down to the bottom, and then he laid it out on the bed and squashed the remaining corners inside before doing up the poppers. Each one released a snap into the silence.

"How's she ever meant to talk about it if you won't?"

"I will talk about it—" Henry adjusted the quilt so that its edges draped evenly across the mattress. "—with her."

"But why not with us?"

With his hands on his hips, Henry surveyed his work. He took a deep breath. _Should making a bed really work up a sweat?_ And then he pivoted to face Jason, who met him with a scowl, the one that definitely belonged to Elizabeth.

"Come here." He motioned to the end of the bed. He sat down, and as the mattress slumped beneath him, his body gave a sigh of relief.

When Jason continued to hover, he patted the space beside him.

"Why?" Jason gave a stilted shrug. "You're just going to patronise me."

"No, I'm going to talk to you."

Jason's scowl persisted for a moment or two longer before it eased, just a fraction. Then he perched at the edge of the mattress next to Henry.

Henry clasped Jason's shoulder. "Look, Mom's going through a tough time—"

Jason snorted.

Henry's grip tightened. "—but she still has her right to privacy. You wouldn't want me going round telling people things you'd told me in confidence, would you?"

"No…"

"And this is just the same."

Jason hung his head, and his lips drew into a pout.

"Just give her a little time at the…_neural health facility_—" Henry squeezed Jason's shoulder until Jason yielded and the hint of a smile lit his face. "—and once she's home, we can talk about it then, if that's what she wants." His touch lightened, and he looked Jason in the eye. "I'm not trying to hide anything from you, the truth is I just don't really know what's going on with her right now, and I don't want to speak for her. Okay?"

Jason bunched his lips to one side, as though he were fighting back all the arguments that leapt to his tongue as to why that wasn't okay, but he nodded. He fiddled with the cuff of his shirt sleeve, and his gaze dipped towards the tuft of blue threads that barely clung onto the button. After a moment or so, he met Henry's eye again. "Do they tell you anything?"

The landline wailed downstairs and sharpened the pause, a counterpoint to the surrounding silence.

"Some things." Henry's lips quirked into no more than half a smile. "She's mainly been catching up on sleep."

"Snow 'em and stow 'em."

Henry chuckled. "I'm pretty sure that's not PC."

"So, what are you going to tell Aunt Maureen?"

Henry drew in a breath that rolled to the bottom of his lungs. He massaged the back of his neck, his fingers pressing the knots, and then gave a shrug. "The story's that she's staying at the hospital with Uncle Will after he's suffered complications from food poisoning."

Jason's nose crinkled. "Food poisoning? Seriously?"

"I think it's Russell Jackson's idea of a joke."

"Well, it gets an F for creativity."

"Speaking of Russell—" Stevie's voice came from the doorway, and Henry's head jerked up to find her clinging to the door frame as she leant against the wood. "He's here."

Henry frowned. "Here?"

Stevie nodded.

"Now?"

Her lips bunched to the side and she nodded again. "Says he needs to speak to you."

Henry pushed the cuff of his sleeve up his arm, the cotton grazing his skin, and he glanced at his watch. "I'm meant to be collecting your aunt from the station in just over half an hour."

"I can go."

Henry looked up at her. A pause. "You sure?"

"Of course. Just give me a chance to put something proper on." Stevie tugged at the front of her kimono dressing gown and set the silk shimmering in a cascade of flamingo pink as it caught the sunlight. "You should've seen the look Russell just gave me when I answered the door looking like this. Anyone would think I'd skinned the Snowths."

* * *

"How the hell do you have time to read all these?" With his hands on his hips and pushing back the open fronts of his black overcoat, Russell pivoted towards Henry and then back to the bookshelves that dominated the wall of the study.

The door roared against its runners as Henry slid it shut behind him. "Hello to you too, Russell."

"Seriously." Russell glanced at him again. "The only way I have time to get through a book nowadays is if I listen to it on audio, and even then I only get a third of the way through because the narrators are so goddamn irritating."

Henry perched against the front edge of his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. He gave a shrug. "I guess we all have different priorities."

"Well, you can save the lecture on priorities for your wife." Russell stepped away from the shelves and stood in front of Henry. His gaze flickered for a moment, as though skittering over a grid of words as he plucked out the ones to line up on the tip of his tongue, and then his look locked on Henry. "I hear she's not engaging in therapy."

Henry's breath froze—one second, two seconds, three—and then he let out a huff and shook his head to himself. "I don't know why it surprises me that you know that already."

"She needs to start doing something, and quickly."

"I'm sorry if her being unwell doesn't fit into your schedule—"

"It's not about my schedule."

Henry raised his voice. "—but it's not exactly what I had planned either. So stop 'checking in' on her and give her a little privacy."

The front door sighed open and then clunked shut. It sent out a reverberation that caused the net curtains on the opposite side of the room to tremor. Alison strode along the hallway, her high heels clomping off the wood, whilst her head bopped and grooved in time to the beat that pulsed from her earphones.

Both Russell's and Henry's gazes followed her until the clunk of footsteps faded upstairs. Then Russell turned back to Henry. "Funny you should mention privacy."

He twisted around and picked up the manila folder that rested on top of the State Department files stacked at the corner of Elizabeth's desk. He prised back the cover and pulled out a wad of glossy sheets that he then extended to Henry.

A frown unfurled across Henry's brow as he stared at the offering suspended between them. He could take them and look for himself, but the subtle churning at the pit of his stomach, like the first eddies that fed into a maelstrom, told him that he wouldn't want to see. "What are they?"

"Tickets to see Taylor Swift. What do they look like to you?"

He snatched the photographs from Russell's grasp. Their glossy finish tacked to the pads of his fingers and thumbs, and the rasp of paper scraping over paper filled the air as he frowned down at them one by one and cycled each to the bottom of the pile.

The street outside beneath the purple blush of twilight, whilst the smoulder of lamp posts rained down and simmered cold in the windshields of cars; Stevie with her hair slicked into a high ponytail, her cheeks flushed, and her palms rested against the pillar of the porch as she stretched out her legs post-run; a line of three black SUVs, smudged by a blur of grey as a car sailed past; Alison stood beneath the frame of the front door, with white light flooding out around her as she held out a banknote snapped between her first two fingers to a man in a crimson pizza delivery uniform; the rain-beaded image of Kat and Jay hovering at the side of the road, huddled in their black woollen overcoats with collars flipped up; a golden glow that bled out through the curtains of the study and dissolved into darkness, but blocked by a shadow, the outline of Elizabeth, her knees hugged to her chest, her head falling back to rest against the wall behind; a close-up of a licence plate, and another, and another; Dr Sherman with one hand laid against the trunk lid of her car, whilst the other hoisted Elizabeth's bag inside; Elizabeth swathed in black, except for the powder blue of her pyjama bottoms that peeked from beneath the hem of her coat and that shimmered in the amber haze of street lights; Elizabeth swathed in black, a darkness that swamped her, that embraced her, that seeped into her eyes; Elizabeth swathed in black, her lips downturned, her brow pinched, her cheeks concaved; Elizabeth swathed in black…_I'm sorry that I lied._

Henry tugged at his mouth and sank further back against the desk, letting it bear all of his weight, whilst the peach sunlight that infused the room turned a shade darker, as though a shadow skulked outside. He thumbed back to the picture of Elizabeth, curled up on the window ledge, no more than five paces away from where he stood right now, and as he looked up and stared past Russell into the window bay, he could almost make out the ghost of her image, as though her presence lingered on from that night, as subtle yet as insinuating as the perfume that clung to their bedding, his clothing, every fibre of the house, and like the perfume, it carried a sting, though this sting came not from the pain of a promise unfulfilled, but from the realisation that he had not been there to witness that image in life, that most likely he had been fast asleep.

But someone else had seen.

Someone else had been waiting on the other side of that glass, ready to capture that snapshot of her suffering, to snatch up that piece of the puzzle and secret it away. They had stolen it from him, they had denied him the chance to help her, denied him the chance to stop the events that would unfold the following night. _Will's not dead…not yet…but I should be._

Or at least that's how it felt. But perhaps it was just a salve for the blame, for not seeing what a single image could show so clearly. Or maybe just a stark reminder: _You can't watch her twenty-four hours a day._

He lowered the photographs at the top of the stack so that they hid that picture, burying it beneath what ought to have been more prominent in his mind. Someone had been watching their house, someone had been documenting their movements, someone had been lurking just metres away. With his jaw clenched, he forced out the words. "Is she safe? Are our children safe?"

Russell gave a curt nod. "Yes."

Henry's voice rose, and he swept one hand towards the street outside. "But if the people who poisoned her have been—"

"They're not the ones who took the photographs."

Henry stopped. He shook his head and his frown deepened. "What do you mean?"

Russell pulled another picture from the file, adding a crisp swish to the silence, and he held it out to Henry. "That would be this man."

The photograph showed a close-up of a man, either a heavy smoker or in his late forties, or so said the loose skin that sagged beneath his eyes. He sported a rat's nest of grey hair, a ten-day stubble, and a mouth made for a snarl.

Henry eyed the image as the page bowed into the gap between them, but rather than taking it and resting it atop the pile, he declined it with the wave of a hand. "Who is he?"

"Just another link in the chain." Russell placed the picture on the desk behind him, and then arched his fingers atop it. "We picked up David Bailey here and brought him in for questioning. At first he refused to talk, some noble idea about protecting whoever hired him, even if that meant doing jail time. But when we informed him he was being interviewed in connection with an assassination attempt…well, turns out even he has his limits."

He produced another sheet from the folder. "Told us he was hired by this guy." This time he held up the photograph, rather than offering it to Henry. "And the payment record confirms it."

"And who's he?"

With thick-rimmed glasses and a pasty complexion, as though he hadn't seen sunlight since Conrad's first inauguration, the man could have passed for the other one's weedy younger brother.

"A DC staffer," Russell said, "and working for none other than Senator Morejon."

In the silence, Russell's lips quirked into a kind of glum smile.

"I don't understand." Henry pinched the bridge of his nose. "Senator Morejon sent someone to spy on our house? To take pictures of everyone who came and went?"

Russell leant back against the edge of Elizabeth's desk. He clasped the folder in both hands in front of him and gave a half-shrug. "We knew he'd been digging around, trying to find out what was going on, but we didn't think even he'd sink this low."

"But why? What could he possibly have to gain?"

"You must've heard his daily sermons on Elizabeth not being fit for the job, calling for Dalton to fire her. And he never bought into the story about her taking time with the family. Who knows what he was hoping to find, but you can sure as hell guess what he was thinking when he saw a picture of her looking like that—" Russell stabbed a finger at the photograph on top of the pile still clutched in Henry's hand, the one of Elizabeth leaving for the clinic. "—and learnt that she was getting into a car with a therapist, one of whose specialties is addiction."

"But she's not being treated for addiction."

"And she didn't murder the Assistant Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for Timor-Leste." Russell's eyes bugged. "Do you really think Morejon gives a crap about the truth? All he cares about is tarnishing this administration and ruining her hopes of running in the next election."

Tension radiated along Henry's jaw. Who cared about the administration or the election? If Elizabeth found out people were printing these allegations, if she found out people knew she was at the clinic… Shame had burned her face at the thought of sharing with him—her husband, her friend, her confidante—just a hint of what was going through her mind, but if it were splashed across the tabloids for the whole world to see…

"Please tell me this hasn't leaked."

"We shut it down. And these—" Russell gestured to the stack of photographs. "—are the only copies."

The tension that gripped Henry's body eased, though nowhere near completely, just enough for a tremble to falter through his legs as he pushed himself away from the edge of the desk and placed the pictures in Russell's outstretched hand.

Russell turned his back on Henry, jostled the photographs together atop Elizabeth's desk, and crammed them into the folder. "Rather than having the balls to make the allegation himself, or perhaps knowing that no credible news outlet would run a story based on some paparazzi-style photo, Morejon decided to feed it to a blogger and let him make the accusation instead. From there, it would have trickled up into the mainstream, ready for him to add his own comments and call for her resignation, as though he weren't the one to orchestrate the whole damn thing in the first place. And another time, it might've worked, had the blogger not been strapped for cash, and had he not gotten himself tangled up in the investigation." He shot a glance over his shoulder. "You might want to thank Mike B and his DC Irregulars, by the way."

"I'm sure Elizabeth will be thrilled to hear that." Henry leant back against his desk again, and folded his arms across his chest. "So, what happens now? To Morejon."

"I'm glad you brought that up." Russell shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto the armchair in the corner of the room before he turned to Henry once more. He rested his hands against his hips, and his shoulders gave a flinch, as though to nudge himself into whatever he had to say next. "I spoke to DoJ and they don't think we can make any charges stick—"

Henry opened his mouth, though the protest was no more than an incoherent surge.

Russell held up one hand. "There's nothing concrete to prove that Morejon ordered his staffer to hire the photographer, and all Morejon would have to say is that he had no idea what his staffer was doing, that he's appalled by his actions and that he'd never condone such behaviour. Plus, a case like this…it could get messy."

"So, what? We're just going to let him get away with it? He already knows something's going on, so what's to stop him from doing it again? Or finding out where she's staying and taking it straight to the press? You go on about Elizabeth needing to get better and quickly, but in order to do that, she needs her privacy."

Russell crept half a step closer, one hand still raised, a star to push back those thoughts. "I'm not suggesting we let him get away with it."

"Then what?"

Russell paused. Then another flinch. "Oppo."

"Do it."

Or at least, that's what Henry wanted to say. And he would give a casual shrug, just to emphasise how easy his mind told him such a decision ought to be. After all, Morejon had sent someone to watch their home, to pry into Elizabeth's suffering, to exploit her vulnerability, as though such things made her weak. To use oppo against him would only be fair, a kind of retributive justice, Exodus 21:23-25.

But what of the Sermon on the Mount? Or more to the point, what of Elizabeth's wishes?

He had often wondered, both to himself and aloud, _Why him_? When Elizabeth could have picked anyone she wanted to start a life with, what made him the one that she chose? _I guess I have a thing for desert boots_, she had joked once, before her expression sobered and she drew him close_, Because you're a good man, Henry McCord._

But despite all that, the temptation remained. It was the right thing to do, surely. To protect her, to give her privacy, to allow her the space she needed to recover, to return to them, to make it through this and become all that much stronger. Could he—No. _Should _he debase himself by lowering himself to the standards of Carlos Morejon?

Henry shook his head. "No."

Russell's eager look withered into decay. "What do you mean 'no'?"

"There has to be another way, one that doesn't use oppo."

"What? Like beating Morejon to punch by having the White House release a statement saying that she was poisoned, but when that didn't work, she thought she'd finish the job herself?"

Henry's jaw clenched, and as the trundle of footsteps bundled down the stairs, he lowered his voice to little more than a hiss. "Being flippant and making jibes about her mental health aren't going to sell me on the idea, Russell."

"Then what will?" Russell's eyes widened, a genuine question, as though Henry could have whatever he wanted, if only he would name it. "She doesn't need to be defined by this, Henry, but if we do nothing, Morejon won't stop until she is."

"That doesn't change the fact you know how she feels about oppo."

"She's opposed to it. I'm painfully aware. In fact, her _morals_ are the only reason that creep's still lurking around DC. Makes the whole situation kind of ironic if you think about it. For God only knows what reason, she's always defended the guy, but the moment she's out of the picture, he tries to take her down, and now there's no one left to protect him. Except for you, apparently."

"Then why even ask me? You're going to do whatever you want anyway."

Russell gave a stilted shrug, and his gaze fell away to the woven diamonds of the rug beneath their feet. "Thought you might like the chance to stand up for her for once. The guy's trying to destroy your wife's career, for crying out loud."

Henry's eyes narrowed, and with his arms still folded, he eased away from the edge of the desk. "You don't want to go against her, do you? You knew she'd say no, but you thought if you got my approval, somehow that would make it okay."

"I don't give a damn about your approval."

"But you do care about hers."

Russell paced away towards the armchair and grabbed his coat. "That's a nice assessment, professor, but I didn't need her approval before, and I certainly don't need it now."

"She won't forgive you for this."

"Forgiveness." Russell slung the coat over his arm. "Another thing I don't need."

He lifted the manila file from Elizabeth's desk, and then strode towards the doors that led into the entrance hall. But then he stopped and turned back to Henry. "Oh, and by the way, the FBI want to speak to her again. They need to go through—"

"No."

"God. Why does everything have to be a debate with you McCords?"

"Then how about we skip the debate? They're not interviewing her, Russell."

"Why not?"

"The last time they spoke to her, they all but blamed her for not being able to help her brother, told her that only she could help them solve this."

"That's because she's the only witness. And now that Morejon has led us down the long and winding path to nowhere, we're back to square one, only with the added knowledge that DS didn't have a clue that someone was watching the house, so God only knows what else they might have missed." Russell held his arms out wide, whilst his gaze bored into Henry. "Surely you want to catch this guy."

"Of course I do, but she's already told them everything she knows." Henry motioned towards the bookcase, to the trace of their conversation before. "You said she needs to think about her priorities, and right now that means focusing on herself, not going over the same old questions."

"They want to show her pictures from the restaurant, see if that might jog her memory."

"Traumatise her more like."

Russell's voice strained. "How are tables and chairs going to traumatise her?"

"I said no." Henry gestured to the manila file in Russell's hand. "You can do what you want with Morejon, that's up to you, but you and the FBI and whoever else will not be harassing my wife. End of discussion."

The rise and fall of an engine's roar and the swoosh of tyres on tarmac filtered through the window and filled the room, an underscore to the silence.

Russell studied Henry, his only movement the slight flicker of his gaze, and as he did, something in his eyes hardened. "You might think that you're protecting her, but wrapping her in cotton wool isn't going to help her, not in the long run."

Henry shook his head, slowly. "Not your call, Russell."

That obsidian look remained, and Henry steeled himself for another verbal spar. Going after Morejon was one thing, but disturbing Elizabeth, now especially—

"Not your call."

Russell held his gaze for a beat longer, until the look started to fracture, hairline cracks that splintered across the surface. Then he let his gaze drop towards the manila file, his shoulders slumping in time, and as he scratched the back of his head, he muttered, "No, I don't suppose it is."

After speaking to the clinic that morning and hearing the little that they would tell him, Henry had once again felt like there was nothing he could do to help Elizabeth, at least not directly. But having Russell back down? He'd take that. After all, wars were won in a string of minor victories.

"Fine. No FBI." Russell tucked the manila file beneath his arm and he stepped towards the doors again. "But, I have to ask… She didn't discuss anything over the phone with her brother, did she? Anything sensitive. Anything we wouldn't want getting out."

The door creaked as he rolled it aside.

Henry frowned and followed him out into the hallway. "No. I don't think so. Why?"

Russell stopped by the front door and pivoted back to face him. He took a breath that looked as though it stuck halfway down his chest, before he sighed it out. "His cell phone had been tampered with, and they suspect someone was listening in leading up to the poisoning."

Henry rubbed his brow as he fought to remember what she had said, if she had said anything to him about conversations with Will, and surely he would remember, because any conversation was bound to spark a tirade. He let his hand fall back to his side, and he met Russell's gaze. "She called to invite him to lunch the week before it happened, maybe sent the odd text here and there, a few emojis, but nothing sensitive, no."

"Good. That's the last thing we need on top of everything else." Russell grasped the handle and tugged open the door. "Well, I'll leave you to it. Stevie mentioned you have a guest."

"Yeah." Henry ran one hand through his hair, and he held the front door open as Russell stepped out onto the black and white tiles. "My sister's coming to visit."

"The sister-in-law, huh?" Russell shot a glance over his shoulder, his eyebrows raised. "No wonder Bess didn't fight them when they extended her hold."

He pulled open the outer door, and a bar of sunlight struck the wall, fanned out through the porch and flooded the hallway, but the warmth that it carried ebbed away as a chill gust tumbled through too.

The bite in the air prickled over Henry. "What did she say to you?"

"Well, if I told you that, I wouldn't be respecting her privacy." Russell strode away along the paved path towards the street. He raised the manila file in a wave. "Take care, Henry."

* * *

**Thank you for reading! : )**

**Reviews are appreciated (if you have time).**


	36. Chapter Thirty-Four: fall leaves

**Note: **So, this was a difficult chapter to construct and it went through many different sketches and drafts. I hope that it's worth it and that it makes a good read.

* * *

**Chapter Thirty-Four**

**…****fall leaves.**

**Henry**

**7:01 PM**

The aroma of roast chicken buttered the air, and the slosh of wine hitting the curve of the glass and spiralling up along its sides filled the dining room.

Maureen twisted around in her seat—Elizabeth's seat—and peered up at Henry as he poured the Chardonnay into her glass, releasing the delicate scent of apples and a buzz of alcohol that swiftly dissolved into the room. "So, I take it Elizabeth won't be joining us this evening."

Henry paused, no more than half a second, and then flashed her a smile, whilst his grip on the back of her chair tightened. "Not this evening, no."

He stoppered the bottle and clunked it down in the middle of the table.

"And how about tomorrow?" The prickle of Maureen's gaze followed him as he retreated to his seat at the opposite end of the table. "Can we expect to see her then?"

"No, I don't believe so." He pulled out his cell phone from the front pocket of his jeans, set it down next to the place mat, and lowered himself into his seat. He clicked the screen on and then off again. No texts. No missed calls. No news meant good news. Or at least that's what people said. In reality, no news meant no change. Stagnancy. Both for Elizabeth and for Will.

"And let me guess—" Maureen's voice drew his attention away from the phone. "—she won't be here the next day either." She cradled the wine glass in one hand and raised it towards her chest. It caught the twinkle from the chandelier overhead, dancing pinpricks of light.

"No." The phone buzzed, and Henry frowned down at it. His voice grew distant as he studied the screen. "I can't say that she will."

But it was only another notification. _Check out the new features…_

"Dad?"

Henry looked up.

Jason held the bowl of mashed potatoes out to him. A slight pinch nicked the centre of his brow. He handed the bowl over and then leant closer, until the open fronts of his plaid shirt brushed against the edge of the table. "Everything okay?"

Henry offered him a quick smile. "Fine." He dolloped a scoop of mash onto his plate before he passed the bowl on to Alison. "Here you go, Noodle."

"So, there's way too much nut roast…like enough to feed a small country—" Stevie dropped the serving platter the last couple of centimetres onto the table, and the ceramic landed with a muffled thump against the wood. "—so, the rest of you meat-eaters, feel free to pitch in."

She slung the pink gingham oven gloves over the back of her chair, and then slumped down into the seat, just in time to receive the bowl of potatoes from Alison. She helped herself to half a scoop and then passed the bowl onto Maureen, who offered her a smile—"Thank you, dear."—and then loaded up the spoon before she pushed the heap of potato onto her plate with the tip of her knife.

"So, I was surprised to hear that Elizabeth's taken time off work. It's not like her to be away from the office for more than a minute." Maureen carved a sliver of nut roast from the end of the loaf; the knife stuck at first before it slid down to strike the dish. "Even more surprised to hear that she's been staying at the hospital."

Her gaze flicked up, sharp on Henry.

The gazes of the three children prickled over him too.

Henry paused, a slice of roast chicken halfway to his plate. When Russell came up with the cover story, he obviously hadn't factored in Maureen. Then again, given her lack of interest before, Henry hadn't thought she'd be too concerned.

"Well, it's been pretty touch-and-go with her brother, so she'd rather be close, just in case." He flashed Maureen a taut smile, a silent prayer to move on, and then placed the chicken down next to the mound of potato.

The kids took that as their cue to return their meals. Jason and Stevie loaded up their plates, whilst Alison poured gravy in a spiral across her dinner, working inwards towards the centre.

"Even so," Maureen said, "I would've thought she'd prefer the comforts of home."

Henry scooped a pile of carrot batons onto his plate. "It's not so bad there, and it saves her from travelling back and forth." He motioned to the bowl of broccoli that sat in the empty place between Jason and Maureen. "Pass that will you, Jase… Thanks."

"But it's not like it's far. No further than she'd usually travel, surely."

"As I said, it's pretty touch-and-go." Henry flashed her another taut smile, even more strained than before, and he spooned out a couple of florets of broccoli to rest next to the carrots.

"I can't imagine her security like it much, must breach all kinds of protocol."

Stevie leant across Alison and took the bowl of broccoli from Henry; as she did so, she glanced back at Maureen. "Actually, it's easier for them when she stays in one place. Plus, the doors on the ICU are locked, so it's, like, super secure."

Maureen arched her eyebrows at Stevie. "More secure than her own home?"

Stevie stopped, the spoon dug in between the florets of broccoli. She looked to Henry, her eyes wide—_What do I say?_ Or maybe just—_Help._

Henry turned to Alison. "So, how's your coursework coming along, Noodle?"

Alison gave a shrug. "Okay, I guess." She placed the gravy boat down in the middle of the table, next to the salt and pepper shakers, and then raised her thumb to her lips and cleaned off the smear of sauce. "I've narrowed it down to three designs, but—"

"Well, I didn't want to say it," Maureen's voice bulldozed a thick tract of silence through the room, "but it looks like Dad called it."

Alison paused, her mouth hanging open. Her gaze ping-ponged back and forth from one end of the table to the other before it settled on Henry. "Should I…?"

Henry swallowed, and grimaced slightly as the edge of a carrot baton dragged down the back of his throat. "Called what, Maureen?"

Maureen kept her gaze on her plate, and she shook her head to herself as she shredded her portion of chicken into the moat of gravy. "He always said that it would end in tears, that sooner or later she'd tire of the whole princess and the pauper routine."

Henry's brow furrowed. "I'm sorry, the what?"

Jason leant in towards him, and muttered, "Something about a porpoise."

But Henry held up one hand and silenced him as Maureen continued.

"It was obvious that she thought she'd married beneath her." Her eyebrows arched, her gaze still lowered whilst she continued to pull apart the chicken. "We were just surprised that it lasted this long."

"I'm afraid you've lost me."

"You think I don't know my own brother?" Her knife and fork stilled, and she looked up at him. Her gaze whistled across the length of the table. "You've been moping around all day like some lovesick teenager, you're checking your phone more often than these three combined, and you can practically hear the eggshells cracking any time I so much as mention her name."

Henry shook his head, slowly. "Her brother's sick, Maureen."

"I remember the last time you broke up with her." She tipped one finger towards him, and the stainless steel of the knife in her hand shot off a glimmer of light. "And this is just the same."

"Wait a minute. I never—"

"You broke up with Mom?" Stevie's eyes widened, and she held her fist to her lips as she forced down her mouthful.

"Of course I didn't break up with Mom—"

Maureen crossed her arms atop the table and twisted to face Stevie. "It was back when they were in college. They'd been dating for a while, when out of nowhere he comes running home with his tail between his legs, blathering on about how he'd made a huge mistake, that they were never meant to be, all the usual self-pitying nonsense. I tell you, he was insufferable for days."

Henry shook his head. "That's not what happened—"

But Alison rolled her eyes at him. "God, Dad, how stupid were you?"

"Didn't last long, mind. Despite our father's warnings, he ran straight back to her after a few days. Then, next thing we know, he's calling up our mother and telling her they're getting married." Maureen lifted her glass to her lips, and then gave a shrug as she peered down her nose into the wine. "Of course, then we were just waiting to hear that she was pregnant."

Jason turned to Henry. His voice creaked. "You got Mom pregnant?"

"Well, duh." Alison shot him a look. "Where did you think we came from, dummy?"

Jason scowled back at her. "You know what I mean."

Henry held up his hands, ready to part the two of them before any vegetables could become missiles, or perhaps just to stop the onslaught that came from all sides. "I didn't break up with your mother, and I didn't _get her pregnant_. All three of you were conceived in wedlock, and all three of you were planned."

Alison wrinkled her nose and pushed her food around the plate. "Do we really have to discuss that over dinner?"

"Or ever?" Jason added.

Henry looked to Maureen. "Besides, what has any of that got to do with anything anyway?"

Maureen popped half a carrot baton into her mouth, and stared at him as she chewed it over. Then she gave a stilted shrug. "Well, she's left you, hasn't she?"

Henry frowned. "What?" The word escaped in a rush; it left him winded.

She returned to her dinner and sliced a floret of broccoli in half, and then in half again. The edge of the knife chimed off the plate. "Dad always said she would, though he always thought she'd take up with someone while you were overseas."

"Maureen, Elizabeth hasn't left me."

She stabbed one of the pieces of broccoli. The tines of the fork screeched. "_The woman's a flirt_, that's what he used to say, and it was only a matter of time before a better offer came along, someone more in fitting with her standing."

He pulled a face. "I'm sorry. _With her standing_?"

Her gaze darted up and met his eye. "What? It's no secret that she came from money." She shook her head to herself, placed her knife down so that it rested against the edge of the plate, and mopped a piece of chicken through the gravy. "You'd think she could use some of that inheritance of hers to buy herself a blouse that isn't see-through. I mean, is that really how our country conducts diplomacy?"

Alison opened her mouth, but Maureen held up her hand and hushed her before she had the chance to speak. "I know that you might call that fashion, but where we come from, there's another word for it." She took a sip of wine, and then added in a mutter, "Though I don't suppose the president minds; they always were far too friendly."

Henry rubbed his brow, as though to smooth out the furrows, and then let his hand fall to rest in a fist atop the table. "What's this really about, Maureen?"

"I know you think we were too critical of her—"

"Now, why on earth would I think that?"

"—but you couldn't see what the rest of us could see. You were too wrapped up in the idea of the rich, blonde girlfriend…that, and everything else she was offering."

Henry's fingers curled tighter into their fist. "So, tell me. What couldn't I see?"

Maureen dropped her cutlery with a clatter that rang up through the room and tinkled off the glass of the chandelier. She stared Henry in the eye, and her look hardened, her whole face pinched. "She was privileged and entitled and she changed you, Henry."

The words rocked into the silence, like fall leaves swept from the boughs of a tree. Shades of crimson, incandescent orange and flame yellow spiked the air as they swayed down to join the leaf litter below.

Henry clutched his tumbler, the glass sweating against his palm, whilst he clenched his jaw and formed a cage on the defence that sprang to his tongue. He waited—just waited—until the leaves had settled and their colours died out as they blended into the carpet of all those that had fallen before them.

He took a swig of water. His throat tightened around the gulp as he forced it down. Then he returned the glass to the table with a thump, and picked up his knife and fork again. "Right, well, thank you for your insight—" He glanced up at Maureen. "—but Elizabeth hasn't left me."

The darkness outside pressed in and made the air all that much denser than before. At first, the scrape of his cutlery against the plate was the only sound to echo through the room. That, and the occasional rise and fall of cars sailing past. But then the kids returned to their meals too, and added their own screeches of knives dragging across china and chimes of tines impaling the food, until together they formed a kind of symphony, an ode to family discord.

"So…" Alison toyed with a floret of broccoli. "As I was saying, I've got three designs, two of which feel pretty safe, while the other one might be a little more out-there, but then I was thinking—"

"Then why isn't she here? If she hasn't left you, why are you moping around?"

"I'm not moping around." Henry kept his gaze on his plate and he cut the roast chicken into smaller and smaller pieces. "And, as I've already told you, she's staying at the hospital."

"Oh, please. If you're going to lie to me, at least do it well."

"I'm not lying, Maureen."

"Do you honestly expect me to believe that she'd choose to stay on a hospital ward? I bet she's never stayed in anything less than a four star hotel."

Jason whipped around. "Why are you so bitter about Mom?"

Henry let go of his knife and grasped Jason's wrist. "Jase, just leave it, okay?"

But Jason tugged his arm away, his face crumpled in a scowl. "How can you just sit there and let her trash talk Mom? Why won't you stand up for her?"

"Because deep down he knows it's true," Maureen said.

Henry shook his head and returned to slicing the chicken. "Because it's not true, but there's no point in arguing with someone who's not prepared to listen."

"Dad always said that she'd hurt you. I know you like to think ill of him, but he was only looking out for you. He saw how she made you turn your back on the family."

Henry gave a bitter chuckle. "I didn't turn my back on the family. And isn't it about time you started forming your own opinions, rather than just parroting everything that Dad said?"

"You became more distant, you visited less often, and when you did come back, you were a different person. Always running around after her, waiting on her hand and foot, as though she couldn't possibly do anything for herself."

"I grew up, Maureen. And forgive me for trying to make her feel welcome."

"Well, I suppose it must have been such an ordeal for her, having to slum it with the rest of us."

Henry's gaze flicked up. "Did she ever once complain?"

Maureen folded her arms across her chest, the dinner now forgotten. "She didn't have to when she sat there looking sullen, took the first opportunity to excuse herself, and couldn't wait to leave."

Jason's knuckles blanched as he clutched his cutlery. "Will you quit slagging off our mom?"

"Jason, just drop it." Henry rested his hand against Jason's forearm, until Jason's hold on the cutlery loosened. Then he looked across to Maureen, and his tone hardened. "That goes for you too, Maureen."

A lull settled over them, as thick as a swathe of fog.

Henry cast his gaze around the table, sweeping past Maureen. "Right, now that that's done, can we just enjoy our meal?" He turned back to Alison. "Noodle, you were saying—"

Maureen held up her hands. "Look, I can tell when you're not happy, and you can deny it all you want, but I know there's something going on. And if she's left you—"

Jason chucked his cutlery down onto the table. "She's at a clinic, okay?"

Henry's jaw clenched. "_Jay-son_." He bit out the name.

"What?" Jason tossed his hands up. "If you're not going to say anything."

"That information's classified."

"So, you'd rather she call her a slut, or stuck up, or whatever else she's saying?"

"I'd rather we weren't having this conversation at all."

Maureen's gaze locked on Jason, and she leant in closer, conspiratorial. "It's alcohol, isn't it?"

"God." Stevie dropped her cutlery. It hit the edge of her plate and clattered to the table. "Will people just quit calling her an alcoholic?"

Alison turned to her sister with a heavy frown. "Who's been calling her an alcoholic?"

"Senator Morejon." Stevie's voice turned shrill. "He was creeping around the White House the other day."

Maureen shook her head to herself, though the corners of her lips maintained a slight upward curl, whilst she cradled her own glass of wine. "We always knew she had a problem."

"She doesn't have a problem," Henry said, and then he looked to Stevie. "And don't listen to Senator Morejon."

"Well, it's kinda hard not to when he's in my face grilling me about Mom self-medicating."

Maureen stared at Henry. "If she doesn't have a problem, then why was it that I always found her sneaking swigs of Scotch whenever she thought no one was looking?"

Henry's brow furrowed. _What the—?_ "Since when was she _sneaking swigs of Scotch_?"

Stevie scowled at Maureen. "Maybe she wouldn't have to if you and Grandpa didn't make the visits so unbearable, always talking about her behind her back and calling her names."

Maureen pursed her lips. She laid her palms flat to the table, and her fingers fluttered down against the surface. "You can't blame us. We tried our best to make her feel welcome—"

Jason snorted. "Sure sounds like it."

"—but I suppose if she had a drinking problem, that makes a lot of sense."

"Oh. My. God." Stevie threw her hands up. "She's not got a drinking problem."

"Then why else is she at a clinic?"

The room tumbled into silence, the kind that pulsed and strained. Stevie, Alison and Jason looked to Henry, but he lowered his gaze and stared into the distance between the salt and pepper shakers. He leant his elbows to the armrests, his hands propped against the edge of the table, and his thumb rubbed his wedding band until it slipped and twisted around and around.

Stevie's voice softened. "She's depressed, okay?"

"What's she got to be depressed about?"

Henry's thumb stilled, and he looked up at Maureen. "She's been through a lot, and now with her brother…it's a lot for her to process."

"But she's got the big, fancy house, plenty of money, the perfect family, people running around after her, chauffeuring her everywhere and buying her everything she needs."

He shook his head, and kept his tone low and level. "That's not how it works, Maureen."

"You know not everyone has the luxury of taking a timeout from life and checking into a clinic."

"I'd hardly call it a luxury."

"So, what? You think the rest of us can just stop work and go away for a few weeks? Most people can't even afford a vacation." Maureen's brow gathered into a frown. "And isn't she being a bit insensitive?"

Henry wrinkled his nose and drew his chin back. "How's she being insensitive?"

"Well, she knows what happened to our father."

"What? So no one else can possibly struggle because of what happened to Dad?"

"Don't you think she's overreacting? I mean, Dad lost everything, had no one to turn to, but her brother gets sick and the whole world's meant to stop?" Maureen let out a huff, and as she shook her head to herself, the silver crucifix that peeked from beneath the collar of her blue roll-neck caught the light and trembled. "Though, what else should we expect from Queen Elizabeth?"

Henry stared at her as the words fell into the hush, more leaves to add to the rotting pile. And this was the point where Elizabeth would slip her hand into his, would offer him a soft smile, would reassure him, _Really, Henry, it's okay_.

Only, of course, she couldn't, she wouldn't, and even if she did, he didn't know if that would stop him. Not when thirty years of history gaped before him. A series of snapshots. Discarded words. Cruel names. One after the other after the other. All leading to the here and now. To Maureen. Her face pinched with disapproval. Sitting in the seat—Sorry, _throne_—where Elizabeth ought to be.

"You and Dad never gave her a chance. You chose not to like her from the very beginning."

Maureen drew back, as though slapped. "We put up with her, didn't we?"

A bitter laugh escaped him. "Well, that says it all."

"She might not have left you, but doing this… She's still hurt you, all the same."

"No." He shook his head. "What hurts me is that I never stood up for her, that I always made excuses for you and Dad, that I listened to her when she said she didn't mind that you treated her like that, that I pretended I didn't see that it upset her, just so I could keep the peace. What hurts me is that rather than accepting her, you chose to put me in between."

"We only wanted what was best for you."

"Did you ever stop to think that maybe she was what's best for me?"

Her gaze sharpened, and her lips curled around the words as she thrust them out. "She changed you, Henry."

"Yes." He gave a curt nod. "She did. She made me step up, she made me a husband, she made me a father. She made me feel like I was enough—No—more than enough, like I was everything. And no matter what you or Dad or anyone else can say, she's everything to me."

"Well, as touching as that is—"

"I'm not done."

Maureen's mouth hung open. She floundered over the words he hadn't let her say.

"Yes, she had money, she went to boarding school, she had rich friends, and she didn't have to work her way through college. And you know why? Because her parents died. She was a child, Maureen, and she had no home, no parents, no real family. And she'd have given up every last cent of her inheritance to get that back. She never wanted that money.

"And you complain about her being quiet and sullen when she first came to visit, or excusing herself early each evening. You know why? Because being around us, seeing us all together, that made her miss her family. And every time I went up to check on her, I found her crying, and trying to hide it because she didn't want to ruin the time I was meant to be spending with you.

"And as for cutting visits short or not coming so frequently? Well, that was down to me, because I didn't want her getting hurt by you and Dad and all your petty little comments, and I didn't want to feel like I had to choose between her and my family.

"And while we're at it, you want to know what made me go running back to her that time and asking her to marry me? Being around the rest of you just made it even clearer in my mind that despite everything, despite every single flaw you and Dad could name, despite every piece of advice and warning that you could throw at me, she was what I wanted, more than anything, she was who I wanted to be with, and she was the one with whom I was going to start my own family.

"And now, whether you believe she has the right to be or not, she's upset and she's struggling and her whole world's falling apart. So, yes, I'm hurt; and yes, I'm missing her; and yes, I'm watching my phone, because I'm terrified that something's going to happen, that the woman who I love, who made me who I am, who means everything to me, isn't going to come back; that something's going to happen, and through no fault of her own, she might just leave me."

Silence.

So much silence.

Maureen continued to stare at him, her expression fixed somewhere between shock and horror, whilst the kids bowed their heads and found interest in their laps, as though in doing so they could somehow shrink back and remove themselves from the room.

"I'm not asking you to like her, but she's my wife and she's their mother, so accept it and show her the respect that she deserves." He gestured to the crucifix that hung from her neck, still glinting, softly shimmering with the rise and fall of each breath. "Or, at the very least, you should show her a little compassion as a fellow human being."

"Amen," Jason murmured.

The phone in the kitchen blared. At first no one moved, but as it continued to ring and pulse through the house, Stevie slipped out from the edge of her seat and hurried into the glow that flowed out from the lamps suspended over the kitchen island.

Her bare feet slapped off the floorboards.

A rattle of plastic on plastic.

"Hello?"

"…"

"No, it's her daughter."

"…"

"Well, she's not here."

"…"

"Okay, wait a sec." She padded back into the dining room, her footsteps muffled by the floral carpet. She stopped next to Henry's seat, the handset clutched to her chest. "It's the hospital."

Henry studied her expression. With the way that her lips twisted and the frown that pitted her brow, something inside him began to sink. "What did they say?"

"They won't speak to me."

"What do you mean?"

"They said that they need to speak to Mom. They said it's about Uncle Will."

He stared at the phone. If he hung up, maybe it would go away.

Her lips twisted even further, no more than a bud. "They said it's urgent."

He nodded, though his mouth had turned dry. He braced himself against the arms of the chair and pushed himself up from his seat. He held his hand out for the receiver. His palm sweated against the plastic as he ambled away towards the lounge and lifted the phone to his ear. "Hi, this is Henry McCord. I'm afraid my wife's not available at the moment, but is there anything I can help with?"

"Dr McCord, I'm sorry…"

Henry stopped. His stomach dropped, just like it had done with the pitch and roll of his plane as it slipped from side to side—the manoeuvre they had used in pilot training, designed to cure their fear of stalls, to teach them how to control the aircraft, to prevent a helical spin. Another falling leaf.

He rubbed his brow, and then his hand fell empty at his side. "Have you been able to contact his partner?"

"…"

"No, of course."

"…"

"No, I'll be there when I can."

The line fell dead.

How on earth was he meant to tell Elizabeth that?

* * *

**Thank you for reading! Reviews make me happy.**

**I know some of you are keen to catch up with Elizabeth. We return to her POV next. : )**


	37. Chapter Thirty-Five: definitely

**Chapter Thirty-Five**

**…****definitely.**

**Elizabeth**

**Monday, 19th November, 2018**

**11:16 AM**

The branches of the black walnut tree scattered the sunlight and fractured the sky, a series of nodes and internodes, too many orders to count—at this distance anyway. Elizabeth's breath fogged against the glass, a gasp of condensation that blurred the scene. It should have been a mathematical beauty, once would have been a mathematical beauty. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. But now, as the tree echoed of the one that plagued her in her dreams, instead it stirred something inside of her, until her nerves itched and her stomach prickled and shards of ice shot through her bloodstream.

She grabbed the chain of the roller blind and ran it through her hands, the metal cool and welcome against clammy palms. The rasp of the chain against its casing zipped through the therapy room, and ended in a thunk as the bottom of the blind hit the window ledge.

Nothing.

No beauty. No stirrings. Just a screen of passive pink.

A blank canvas to numb the mind.

Elizabeth padded past the armchairs and retreated to the couch, all passive pink to match the blind. She picked up her mug from the glass coffee table, sank down onto the cushions of the couch, and tucked her legs beneath her. The leather pressed cold through her jeans and tee. With the mug clutched to her chest, her fingers leaching the warmth through the ceramic, she watched Dr Sherman where she perched on the seat opposite, her elbows rested against the arms of the chair whilst her gaze drifted lower and lower and lower down the page.

Elizabeth watched. She sipped. She waited.

"Elizabeth…" With her rollerball pen still wedged against her palm, Dr Sherman massaged the middle of her brow, but her look of exasperation didn't ease away, only deepened. Her hand dropped, and she arched her fingers atop the questionnaire pinned to the clipboard that rested in her lap. "I've known clients on uppers who don't feel as good as this."

Elizabeth hid her lips behind the rim of her coffee cup and gave a stilted shrug. "Okay, I confess I might've massaged the numbers a bit, but I'm feeling much better. Really."

Dr Sherman lifted the clasp on the clipboard and slipped the filled-out sheet free. She slotted a blank questionnaire into place, let the clasp fall with a clack, and then held out the clipboard, forming half a bridge over the coffee table. "Try again. Honestly this time, please."

Elizabeth slid her legs over the edge of the couch until her toes found the brush of the nylon carpet. She clunked the mug down against the glass, and as she reached for the clipboard, a stretch spread along her arm and into her shoulder.

With the clipboard balanced against her knees, she hunched forward and dragged the capped end of the pen from question to question, and as she read through them again, the words didn't taunt her the same way they had done that first night, yet still they jarred in her mind.

_This is numbers, Henry. Black and white._ And she definitely was feeling better, she definitely didn't feel as bad as that first night, she definitely wouldn't do anything, she definitely wouldn't harm her family. But numbers were numbers, black and white. And unless they told her that everything was fine, she definitely didn't want to hear what they had to say.

She stopped, tapped the pen against the clipboard, three sharps beats, and then looked up at Dr Sherman. "What's the point?"

Dr Sherman studied her, as though she were looking for the trick in the question, the wire that would trip her up. "The point is to assess how you're feeling."

"No, I mean, what's the point when we both know that I can fill this out however I want, so no matter what the score is, you're not going to believe me?"

"That's a rather cynical point of view."

"It also happens to be true." Elizabeth laid the pen on top of the clipboard and then slid the clipboard onto the coffee table, pushing it just far enough so that it clung on to the glass whilst still extending out over the edge, a precipice in red plastic. "You can't honestly tell me that you actually believe patients when they fill out these things."

Dr Sherman's lips quirked into a smile, a hint of amusement. "Most patients realise that we don't do this for my benefit, but for theirs, so they feel no need to _massage the numbers_."

But most patients probably weren't relying on numbers to assuage a sense of unease.

Elizabeth picked up her cup again, settled back against the cushions of the couch, and met Dr Sherman's eye. "What's it going to take for you to stop extending my hold?"

"Well, filling out the questionnaire would be a start. But I'd also like for you to talk to me."

Elizabeth shook her head. "I didn't come here to talk, I came here to sleep, and now that I've done that, I'd like to leave."

"You also came here because you were concerned that you might hurt yourself."

She took a long sip, and let the coffee roll over her tongue. _Look me in the eye and tell me you haven't thought about it, tell me that I'm wrong. Please tell me that I'm wrong._ The bitter kick hit the back of her throat, and elicited a slight wince as she swallowed. "Well, that isn't a concern anymore."

"Isn't it?"

"Not for me, it isn't."

"It's awfully hard to assess your mental state when you won't talk to anyone."

"I'm talking now, aren't I?"

"You are." Dr Sherman's lips stretched into a thin smile. She held Elizabeth's gaze for a moment, and then she stooped down and picked up the black ring binder that rested on the carpet next to her feet. She balanced the file in her lap, prised back the cover and flicked through the sheets of handwritten notes. "But you spent your first four days here sleeping, and since then you've only left your room for mealtimes, you're not attending any of the classes or group therapy, and you're not telling anyone how you're feeling."

"I'm feeling like there's less surveillance in a police state." Elizabeth hunkered forward in her seat, her elbows to her knees, and her gaze sharpened on Dr Sherman. "Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to have someone follow you around everywhere, like a glowing sign above your head, 'Keep an eye on this one; she might just top herself', or having someone watch you take a shower because they don't trust you not to hang yourself with the cord, or having someone monitor every bite you eat as though you're totally incapable of feeding yourself? And what's worse, they record it all in that file, so if I so much as look at someone the wrong way, it's taken as a sure sign that I'm about to start talking to the walls."

The corners of Dr Sherman's lips curled, though she fought to resist it. "It's—"

"Standard procedure. Yeah, I know."

Dr Sherman clasped her hands atop the file. "What did you think it would be like here?"

"Well, it's not like I have a wealth of experience when it comes to mental health facilities, but if I'd known it'd be like this…" Elizabeth shook her head to herself, and her gaze drifted until it landed on the glaring red panic button next to the door. The colour alone was enough to stir a flinch. "God, I shouldn't be here."

"The adjustment can be difficult, but it's for your own safety."

Elizabeth took another swig of coffee. "So people keep telling me."

"But if you'd agreed to start talking to the staff and attending some of the sessions, you could have been taken off supervision days ago."

"As I said, I'm not here to talk."

Dr Sherman gave a shrug, one mimicked by the movement of her lips. "Then I can't say it's safe to take you off supervision now."

Elizabeth stared at her. Her stomach sank, slowly, like a flat pebble—perfect for skipping—drifting to the bottom of a stream. "You're going to extend my hold again."

"Or we can talk." Another shrug, another smile. "It's up to you."

Elizabeth leant back until the cushions of the couch deflated around her. She drew one knee up to her chest, and her bare toes tacked to the leather. With the coffee mug still cradled in both hands, her fingertip automatically found the patch of bare skin where her wedding ring used to sit, and she rubbed that patch, an idle back and forth. Talking, nothing simpler than that. Though in some states, nothing more dangerous too.

Somewhere a door slammed, and it sent reverberations juddering through the walls. Then came the low _bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep _of the panic alarm drifting down the corridor. The sound prickled up the back of Elizabeth's neck, like a shiver crawling inwards rather than shaking itself out, and then it delved deep into her skin. God, she needed to get out of there.

"Fine," Elizabeth said, as a member of staff—no more than a flash of indigo—dashed past the window cut into the door. "What do you want to talk about?"

"You said that you came here to sleep, so how about we start there." Dr Sherman closed the ring binder, leant over the arm of her seat, and propped the file against the base of the chair. But within a second, the cover fell open and the pages fanned towards the floor.

She rested her hands atop the notebook in her lap, and waited for Elizabeth to stop staring at the file and meet her eye. "How are you sleeping?"

"Like a baby." Elizabeth raised her mug to her lips, and then paused. "One without colic."

"You're still taking medication."

"Is that a question or a statement?"

The bleeping cut out, but the air continued to pulse with the ghost of its sound.

"I'd like to wean you off."

But no meds meant nothing to ease her through the dreams, nothing to soften the edge of those images and feelings, nothing to stop the dreams from wrenching her from her sleep…

A protest surged to the tip of Elizabeth's tongue, a blather of phonemes.

But Dr Sherman shook her head and set the hoops of her earrings swaying. The gold glinted, even with the sunlight—and everything else—blocked by the blind. "You know that was only ever a short term solution, you need to address the reason why you're struggling to sleep."

Elizabeth's gaze lowered to the coffee mug clutched in her hands. Her grip tightened, but her tone softened to an auditory shrug. "Everybody struggles from time to time."

"So, it's nothing to do with what happened to you and your brother?"

"I don't want to talk about that."

"You know how this works, Elizabeth." Dr Sherman edged forward in her seat, and she dipped down, as though trying to catch Elizabeth's gaze. "You need to process this trauma in order to stop it from developing into something more."

"Or maybe I don't." Elizabeth's head snapped up, and she swept one hand towards the blind that shielded the window, towards the car park and the gravel track beyond. "Maybe I can just leave here and get on with my life. Maybe people need to quit making this into a big deal."

"You know that you're at high risk, especially given your history, and I have to say that your reluctance to talk about what happened concerns me." The golden hoops waggled as Dr Sherman turned her head from side to side. "Avoidance—"

"I'm not avoiding. There's just nothing to talk about."

Dr Sherman pressed her lips into a line. A breath. Then— "Tell me about that day."

"I don't remember."

She arched her eyebrows. "Nothing at all?"

"No."

"We can start small. Any detail whatsoever."

"I said I don't remember." Elizabeth's voice cracked. "God. What part of that is so hard for people to understand?"

"Okay." Dr Sherman let the word settle into the pause. "Then how about you tell me about your brother…William, wasn't it?"

Elizabeth swallowed, but her throat stuck. Jagged little fishbone. "Will."

"Tell me about Will."

"What about him?"

"How do you feel about him? About what happened to him?"

Elizabeth stared at the hangnail that jutted along the edge of her index finger. She raised it to her lips, and her teeth plucked at the flap of skin. _You'll get worms_, Aunt Joan's voice traced circles through her mind. Elizabeth paused, but only for a second.

Aunt Joan had died. Mom had died. Dad had died. Will had—

She bit off the hangnail, and then waited for the sting as the air cooled the saliva that clung to the raw flesh. A drop of blood blossomed and spilled down into the cleft along the edge of her nail; she sucked it clean and then staunched any further flow with her lips, letting the tang of copper flood her mouth and coat her tongue. The taste turned her stomach, but anything was preferable to those thoughts and where they might lead.

"Elizabeth?" Dr Sherman prompted.

"I feel…" Her hand fell back to the coffee cup that she cradled against the top of her stomach, and she searched the lukewarm depths. _Numb. I feel numb._ "…sad."

"Just sad?"

_Guilty. I feel guilty. _"And angry. I feel angry too."

"Anything else?"

"I feel…" She took a deep breath, but it stuck high in her chest and pressed down upon the top of her lungs. _I feel like just thinking about it makes my head scream_. The exhalation came in a huff. "…I feel like I don't want to talk about it."

"I imagine this must be difficult for you, given what happened to your parents."

"Another thing I don't want to talk about."

"Then what do you want to talk about?"

"How about the fact that global water shortage is a serious issue, yet here we are, watering artificial plants." She gestured to the round glass vase in the middle of the coffee table with its arrangement of faux peonies, their petals perfect teardrops of pearl and blush pink, their plastic stems dipped in and distorted by the three-and-a-half inches of water that filled the base.

Dr Sherman's gaze drifted to the flowers, and then back up to Elizabeth, somewhat wary. "I take your point, but that's not really relevant."

"It will be relevant when we're fighting wars over access to potable water."

"But it's not relevant to your situation right now."

"Look, what do you want me to say? What's going to convince you that I'm no longer a danger to myself? I'm eating, I'm bathing, I'm not fashioning nooses out of socks, so unless you have a compelling reason to detain me, you can't keep extending my hold indefinitely."

"I don't believe you're a danger to yourself right now, staying here in this environment, but I am concerned what might happen if you were to leave."

Elizabeth drew her other leg up onto the couch, and curled her toes into the cool leather. "I'll be fine."

A pause. There came a thump and a scrape, followed by a shadow across the blind as a bird alighted on the other side of the window. Then a throaty _caw-caw-caw_. Almost mocking. Or at least, that's how it seemed.

Dr Sherman shifted in her seat. "Let's assume for a moment that you are fine, that you're right and that this doesn't become an issue for you. But what about next time?"

Elizabeth's gaze snapped up. "What do you mean?"

Dr Sherman gave a slight shrug, her elbows rested against the arms of the chair, her pen still clasped between both hands. "Last time it took a very public panic attack for you to seek help, this time it took your husband being gravely concerned for your safety. What will it take next time? Because there will be a next time."

"There might not be."

"Life is full of trauma, Elizabeth."

"Yet not everybody else gets stuck in a place like this." She gestured to the walls, painted achingly white, almost too pristine, as though they were begging to be tainted by the Crayola scribbles of people's thoughts and memories.

"Because other people are able to cope, or they reach out when they're struggling."

"And I'm not able to cope?"

"Is looking after your brother to the detriment of your own health coping?"

Elizabeth pressed her lips together. A firm line.

"Is refusing to sleep and not eating properly coping?"

Elizabeth pressed her lips together. A firm line.

"Is failing to reach out to me when we've already agreed that's what you're meant to do in a situation like this coping?"

Elizabeth pressed her lips together. A firm line.

Dr Sherman's expression softened. "What made you react this way?"

Elizabeth forced a shrug. "React what way?"

"Why did you put your brother first rather than attending to your own needs?"

"That's what people do when someone they love is hurt."

"You were hurt too."

Elizabeth shook her head. "I'm fine."

"Some might argue you were hurt worse."

The grit in Elizabeth's voice sharpened. "I said I'm fine."

"I understand that you were with your brother when he fell unconscious, that you were the one who got him to hospital, that you watched him receiving treatment before you yourself collapsed." Dr Sherman paused, her lips slightly parted. "Tell me about that day."

"I've already told you, I don't remember."

Dr Sherman leant down and reached for the ring binder at the foot of the chair. She pulled it into her lap, and rested it atop the notebook. "I can talk you through the report, if you like."

Elizabeth's muscles tensed, as though preparing to run. "That won't be necessary."

"Not remembering doesn't protect you. It can affect you all the same."

"Noted. Now, are you going to extend my hold, or are you going to let me leave?"

Outside, tyres ground over the gravel of the car park before they came to a stop with a screech. The crow on the window ledge let out another _caw-caw-caw_, and then its claws scrabbled over the wood and its shadow sailed away.

Dr Sherman studied Elizabeth as though she were sizing her up against each option in turn—extend her hold, or let her leave. "I'd like you to stay here at least until you've come off the sleeping medication."

"Fine," Elizabeth said, though her mind railed at the thought. "I won't take any more."

Dr Sherman shook her head. "If you stop too suddenly, it can cause rebound insomnia, panic, anxiety—"

"I'll deal with it."

Dr Sherman arched her eyebrows. "And going back into that environment? Being faced with potential triggers, your brother… How do you plan on dealing with that?"

"I'll figure it out. As you said, this isn't my first experience of trauma."

"Why are you so reluctant to talk about this?"

"Why do you feel the need to probe? Why can't you just leave it be?"

"That's what therapists do."

"Don't you ever stop to think that dragging up the past might be doing more harm than good?"

"I'd hardly call this the past. What happened to your brother—"

"Stop talking about him." Elizabeth's voice strained and then fractured.

"I'm concerned about you, Elizabeth."

"Well, I've had enough. So, either let me leave, or commit me. If it's the latter, then I want to speak to my lawyer. Even prisons give you a phone call, for crying out loud."

"Is that what this is to you? A prison?"

"Well, I have no freedom, I'm being watched constantly, and I haven't spoken to my husband or children in over a week. Frankly, I'd rather be in prison. It'd be far less draconian."

"How about I reduce your supervision if you agree to attend at least one class or group session each day? You don't have to talk during them, just show up. And then once you've started to make progress in therapy, we can discuss the possibility of phone privileges."

"Or how about I just leave? It's Thanksgiving on Thursday. I should be with my family."

"When you came here, you told me that you didn't want to hurt your husband, that you were worried what might happen if you were to stay at home."

Elizabeth bowed her head. "I was tired. I say things when I'm tired."

"So, you didn't mean what you said?"

"Maybe I meant it in the moment, but the moment's passed, and now I want to leave."

Dr Sherman motioned to the clipboard that still rested atop the coffee table. "Then I'd like you to fill out the questionnaire. Honestly."

Elizabeth clunked her mug down against the glass, snatched up the clipboard and popped the cap off the pen. She raced through the questions. The nib of the pen rasped over the paper as she scored each response in a slash of black ink. Numbers. Black and white.

She stood up and held out the clipboard to Dr Sherman. "Now can I leave?"

Dr Sherman studied the sheet of paper. Her gaze drifted further and further and further down the page. Then she looked up at Elizabeth, her expression neutral, no judgement. "And how does this compare with how you feel on an average day?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "No one feels one hundred per cent all of the time."

Dr Sherman pondered that for a moment, her gaze still lingering on Elizabeth.

And if she said no, Elizabeth really might have to call Mike B. _Now wouldn't that be fun._

But then Dr Sherman gave a curt nod. "See how you get on without the sleeping pills. If your mood is stable, and if you still want to leave by the end of Wednesday, then I won't take action to stop you. But I strongly advise that you stay."

"Great." Elizabeth grabbed her sweater from the opposite end of the couch and strode towards the door. The carpet bristled against her bare soles with every step.

"But, Elizabeth—"

Elizabeth stopped.

"If you do decide to leave, I want you to understand that you can't just go back to the way things were before. Even if you feel better right now, a lot has changed."

Elizabeth grasped the door handle, and the cool metal bit against her palm. "I'll survive. I've been through worse, I'll get through this too."

"I meant with your work. I won't be signing you off as fit to resume your post until you've engaged in therapy."

Elizabeth's hand dropped, and she spun around. A heavy frown descended across her brow. "You can't do that."

Dr Sherman's lips tugged into a flat smile, and she gave a kind of shrug as if to say, _What choice do I have?_ "In my opinion, you're not fit for work. Not until you've dealt with this, and not until you show that you're taking your mental health seriously."

"So, what? You're going to hold me hostage until I've jumped through your hoops?"

"Just take some time to think about it. I'd like you to stay and work with me."

Elizabeth shook her head, her jaw clenched. "Conrad's my friend. If I tell him that I'm ready to come back to work, he'll listen to me."

"Just think about it."

"What's there to think about?" Elizabeth hauled open the door. "I'm fine. He'll listen to me."

The door slammed shut behind her, and as she strode away, the linoleum stuck to her bare soles, making each footstep drag, just slightly. It held a chill too, one that crept up and reignited that stirring of unease. But she pushed it away again, hid it behind the blind. Because she definitely felt better, she definitely felt fine, she definitely would cope, she definitely would survive.

And Conrad?

_"__Trust no one, Bess. That's the motto here at Langley."_

_"__What about you?" She had meant it to be tongue-in-cheek._

_But his expression sobered. "Some days even I don't trust me."_

But nearly three decades of friendship meant something, didn't it? He knew her. He trusted her—

"He will reinstate me."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**If you have a moment, please leave a comment/review. Just knowing that people are still reading keeps me motivated (and stops me from spiralling into panic). : )**


	38. Chapter Thirty-Six: ginger snaps

**Chapter Thirty-Six**

**…****ginger snaps.**

**Elizabeth**

**2005**

Stars. It was easy to forget how many there were after living beneath the light-drenched skies of towns and cities. But out here they didn't just dot the sky, they speckled it and smeared it and whipped it into a Jackson Pollock, stipples of white and gold that shimmered across midnight blue. Had it been like this all those years ago? At once enough to snatch her breath away and set her head in a counterclockwise spin, until it felt as though she could fall upwards and land back in time, back in a place where others, or perhaps just a different version of herself, had seen this scene before.

Moving to the horse farm was meant to be a fresh start, a new beginning, the next chapter in their lives. That, and any other cliché she cared to throw at it. And it had been the right decision: she would make it to every soccer match, every ballet rehearsal, every school play—even if the kids were only ever in the chorus; she would be there for every bowl of cornflakes, for every breakfast burrito on the fly, for every plate of mac 'n' cheese, and who knew, maybe one day she'd even learn how to cook; she would have time to spend with Henry, time that didn't involve fighting about whether or not her job was dangerous, whether or not this was the life they'd both signed up for, and whether or not her priorities were skewed. Yes, it had been the right decision.

Or at least that's what she kept telling herself.

But perhaps, the real truth of the matter was that moving to the horse farm wasn't a case of pushing forward, but instead a yearning to go back, to reconnect with a time when her biggest worry was getting an A on her next assignment, when bad things only happened in dreams and could be cured with a graham cracker and a glass of ice-cold milk, when love was something that just was, as intrinsic as the cardiac rhythm—not something that palpitated, and skipped a beat, and sometimes felt as though it might stop.

…

It was about coming home.

Only she'd had a home, a family, a purpose: The CIA.

And she'd left. For this.

For pushing forward, for an expanse of stars, for chipped white paint on the slats of the split-rail fence, for wind gushing through the bitternut hickories that lined the gravel track, and for Henry, mostly for Henry—_If you go to Baghdad, I don't know what things will look like when you come back_.

She'd had a home. She'd lost a home. She'd had a home. She'd quit.

Elizabeth snatched up the bottle of beer that nestled between her feet on the second from top step of the porch. She raised it to her lips and tipped her head back until bitterness burned down the back of her throat. The cold stung her, and she gave a shudder, one that wasn't entirely unwelcome. Perhaps it would help her to shake this off.

"There you are." Henry's voice came from behind her, followed by the light slap of the door against the frame. The wooden boards creaked beneath his feet, and a moment later, he sank down onto the step next to her and a heavy sigh rushed out. "So, most of the boxes still need to be unpacked, but I think I've found all the essentials. The kids are in bed, though I don't know if all the excitement will keep them up. I'm praying it's worn them out."

Elizabeth took another sip. She ignored the way his gaze tickled her cheek, whilst the grass in the fields before them juddered, electrified by the breeze. The silence here was deeper too, a cavernous sound, not filled with the blare of car horns and the soaring tides of vehicles passing by, nor the soft snorts and whinnies of childhood. A hush that itched with anticipation, as though it were waiting for something to rush in and cancel it out.

Henry smoothed his hand over her lower back, his touch warm through the wash-thinned cotton of her tee. "Everything all right?"

"Fine." She nodded, but she arched away from the touch.

A pause.

"You don't seem fine."

She twisted around to face him. His brow was drawn into a worried frown, a remnant from the aftermath of all those fights, the ones that ought to be over and buried, especially now. "Then how do I seem?"

The frown deepened. "Are you mad at me?"

"No, I'm not mad at you." But her voice splintered.

"Then talk to me."

She shook her head. Turned away. Another sip. "There's nothing to talk about."

The darkness breathed, a stagnant air that pressed between them.

His gaze continued to crawl over her. "Did you hear from Will?"

"Why do you always have to go there?"

"I'm just trying to figure out what's going on with you."

"I said I'm fine."

"You were fine this morning, but now you're acting all…" His fingers fumbled for the word.

She arched an eyebrow at him. "Acting all what?"

"Distant. Like you're pissed at me." He gestured to the house behind them. "And you didn't even say goodnight to the kids."

She stared at him. Seconds must have passed, though they felt more like minutes. Her gaze flickered, fighting against her as she fought to hold his eye, fighting against her as she fought back the words she knew she shouldn't say. But then something inside her collapsed and her gaze fell to the footworn wood of the step that stretched between them. "Maybe this was a mistake."

"What do you mean?"

She eased up from her perch, the bottle clasped in one hand, whilst the other clutched the splinter-rough railing. She turned back to face him. Any anger in his expression had melted into confusion, or perhaps just fear of understanding. "I was making a difference, Henry. I was actually doing something to make the world a better place, and now all I'm going to be doing is writing academic papers that no one's ever going to read and teaching kids who don't give a crap about what I'm saying, so long as I don't fail them and so long as they don't flunk out, because God forbid they miss the next kegger. So maybe this—" She tossed a gesture towards the house, towards their new home. "—was a mistake. Maybe I should've gone to Baghdad."

And now the seconds really did strain into minutes.

Henry scratched the back of his head whilst his gaze dipped towards her feet, sneaker-clad and frozen to the step below his on the porch. When he looked up at her again, his eyes gleamed beneath the starlight and hazel had turned to black. Their flecks remained, though; pinprick pockets of hurt. "Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way, but you being here: that makes a difference to me. And you choosing me and the kids: that makes our world a better place. I thought that was enough for you, I thought that we were enough for you, I _hoped_ that I was enough for you." His lips tweaked into a sorry smile. "But obviously I was wrong."

The words tugged at her chest. That wasn't what she'd meant. She just…

But if she had the words for that, then he wouldn't be looking at her now as though she'd just rent his world apart.

"Henry—" His name escaped in a rush.

"Look, it's been a long day—" He pushed himself to his feet, and brushed his hands down against his jeans. "—I'm tired and I don't want to deal with this now, so you'll have to wait until morning if you're looking to _rectify_ your mistake."

"Henry, wait—" She stooped down and clunked the bottle against the wood, ready to hurry after him as he strode towards the door. But the bottle missed the edge, toppled over, and thunked off every step on the way to the bottom. "Crap."

The bottle rolled to a stop and lay on its side on the darkened path, at a slight tilt, so that the last of the beer glugged out into a pool beneath it, a fizzling mirror for the stars.

Behind her, the door slammed shut and jarred against its frame.

She spun to face the house, to face the trembling door. "Henry—"

Though, of course, he had gone.

"Crap."

Inside, the lights were dimmed, except for the lamp in the lounge that threw off a cold golden glow and cast more shadows than it did light. She kicked off her sneakers and left them in a toppled heap by the front door, and then she padded after him, winding her way through the taped up cardboard boxes as the muffled thump of his footsteps disappeared upstairs. She lowered her voice to a hiss. "Henry." And again. "Henry."

But then, halfway to the staircase, she stopped.

The tug in her chest sharpened, as though someone had reached inside and yanked on her heart until it dangled from tattered threads, for in front of the couch, resting atop one of the boxes—now a makeshift coffee table oh so reminiscent of her time in dorms—were two glass tumblers and a bottle of Pinot Noir. The bottle they'd been saving for a special occasion. A special occasion—like celebrating their first night together in their new home.

"Crap."

Elizabeth pinched her eyes shut. She shook her head to herself, and let out a sharp breath. _If you don't have anything nice to say, then for God's sake, Lizzie, keep your mouth shut._

"Mom?"

Elizabeth's hand dropped to her side and she spun around. Her gaze flailed through the darkness until it landed on Stevie, who stood in the shadows of the archway that led through to the kitchen, her hands tucked into the ends of her pyjama sleeves, her fingers peeking out and curling over the cuffs. "Stevie, baby, what are you doing up?"

Stevie worried her bottom lip between her teeth. "You weren't in your bedroom and there was no one downstairs and I didn't know where you were."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. Dad and I were on the porch." Elizabeth pulled Stevie close, and kissed the top of her head. She soaked up both her scent and her warmth. _Please don't ever be too big for hugs_. "Trouble sleeping?"

Stevie nodded against her, still clinging to the folds of her tee.

Elizabeth smoothed her hand over Stevie's back and kissed the top of her head again. "Hey, how about a biscuit and a glass of milk? That always helps."

Stevie drew back and stared up at Elizabeth. Her lips were still pinched into a worried bud, but her eyes shone—maybe a lingering touch of fear, but more than that: hope. "Ginger snap?"

Elizabeth gave a soft laugh. "Let's see what we've got."

Elizabeth ushered Stevie through to the kitchen, but as soon as Stevie's back had turned, her smile fell away and she shot a glance towards the stairs. She and Henry needed to talk, before the hurt had time to fester, before this fight turned into something more. But what, exactly, was she meant to say?

The light in the kitchen whined and buzzed as it flickered into life. Stevie pulled out one of the chairs; its feet screeched against the wooden floor. She sank into the seat and propped her elbows atop the table, whilst Elizabeth grabbed a tumbler from the draining board.

Footsteps rumbled down the stairs, followed by a whisper that grated through the darkness of the hall. "Stevie? Are you down here? Stevie?"

"She's with me." Elizabeth glanced towards the doorway, just as Henry appeared.

A look of relief swept across his face at the sight of Stevie sat at the table. But then he found Elizabeth's eye, and his expression returned to that simmering mix of hurt and anger that had darkened his features before.

"Trouble sleeping." Elizabeth poured the milk into the tumbler, and then clunked the glass down onto the table and pushed it towards Stevie. "So we're resorting to milk and ginger snaps."

"Well, I can handle that." Henry pushed past her and shot her a look, one that said, _So maybe you should just go_. He opened one of the cupboards above the kitchen counter and reached down an orange cardboard box. Then he pushed past her again and set the box in the middle of the table.

Stevie dragged the packet towards her and dipped her hand inside, but her gaze flitted from Henry, who settled into the chair opposite her, up to Elizabeth, who leant against the side behind him, and as she pulled out one of the ginger biscuits, her movements were every bit as tentative as the look she gave her parents. A look that spoke of suspicion. Suspicion that something had happened between them, suspicion that something was going on. Their child, though not entirely a child anymore.

"So, what's wrong, honey?" Henry said. "Why can't you sleep?"

Stevie nibbled on the edge of the biscuit, and then took a sip of milk. When she placed the glass down again, with a tap against the wood that echoed through the room, her gaze remained fixed on the tumbler, as though the milk were a whitewash for all her fears and thoughts.

And it struck Elizabeth. Not just Stevie's concern, but the words that had failed her before. "She wants to go home."

Stevie looked up at Elizabeth, her eyes wide with a question—_How did you know?_

But then she nodded, and her gaze returned to Henry. "It's dark here and it's too quiet and it smells weird too."

Henry reached his hand across the table. "But, Stevie honey, this is our home now."

Elizabeth snorted. "No, it's not."

"Elizabeth—" Henry twisted around and sent her a dark look.

"It's not our home, Henry. It's just a house." She pushed herself away from the side, pulled out the chair at the end of the table, and seated herself between Henry and their daughter. She covered Stevie's hand with her own, and Henry shrank back—though his gaze continued to bristle at her neck in a way that made 'shooting daggers' less a figure of speech and more of a reality with each passing second. But she ignored him, and squeezed Stevie's hand. "I want to go home too."

"You do?" Stevie's eyes widened again.

"Sure I do. I miss our old home and the way it smells and the sound of cars on the road."

"Really?"

Elizabeth nodded. "Really." In the pause, her mouth hung open and her gaze faltered. She bowed her head, and looked to her and Stevie's hands. "And what's worse, when I was your age, I used to live in a house just like this with my mom and my dad and Uncle Will." She took a breath that lodged in her throat, and then opened her mouth and tasted the silence as the words refused to come. But she had to say them, she had to wrestle them out. She swallowed, and with the blades of Henry's gaze still gouging at her skin, she forced herself to meet Stevie's eye and she offered her a strained smile. "That was my first real home, that was a time when I was happy and I always felt safe and loved, and now being here makes me miss that home and it makes me miss my mom and dad and my brother too."

"Elizabeth…" Henry's chair scraped across the floorboards. He smoothed a circle over her upper back, and then gripped her shoulder. "Why didn't you say?"

Elizabeth covered his fingers and shook her head, and at the deepening pinch in Stevie's brow, she forced her smile wider. "But you know what? I loved that home, and one day soon we'll love this home too. You'll go to a new school and meet lots of new people and make lots of new friends, and it'll be scary at first, but that's okay, because I'll be starting a new job and meeting lots of new people and making lots of new friends too. So, we can be nervous about it together. And we'll decorate your bedroom however you want, and we'll get the horses, and we'll find a place for all our junk." She motioned to the cardboard boxes stacked by the back door. "And one day soon we'll look back and we won't believe that we ever felt like this wasn't our home."

Stevie crunched over a bite of biscuit. "But what if it doesn't feel like home?"

"I promise you it will."

As Stevie alternated nibbles of biscuit and sips of milk, Elizabeth pulled the box of ginger snaps closer. The gloss of the orange cardboard caught the glare of the light overhead, but what struck her more was the smell. That warming mix of ginger and cinnamon along with the kick of nutmeg, enough to drop anyone into the throng of a Christmas market, with its twinkling lights and hot mulled wine and the bustle that funnelled people from stall to stall. That's what that scent would evoke for most people, though it wasn't what it meant to her.

"You know, Mr Dalton gave me a box of ginger snaps once, back when I was struggling with something and feeling lost, and he reminded me that sometimes, when things feel really scary and we can't see a way through, we just need to stop worrying about them and instead take it one step at a time—or one biscuit at a time, I suppose—and if you can do that, eventually you'll find a way through. So, that's what we need to do now, keep taking steps, and trust that one day this house will feel like our home."

Stevie brushed the sticky golden crumbs from her fingertips. She drained the rest of her milk, and then with the back of her sleeve, she wiped the white line from her upper lip and met Elizabeth's eye. "Do you miss him? Mr Dalton?"

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, whilst her gaze settled on the table. She gave a nod. "I do… Which is silly really, because I still get to see him. But I miss not seeing him every day, and I miss Aunt Isobel and Aunt Juliet and Uncle George too. Being with them was like being home in a way, a different kind of home."

Henry's fingers crept towards hers across the tabletop, and she turned her palm over so that he could lace them through her own.

"So, why did you leave?" Stevie asked.

The wedding band on Henry's ring finger shimmered, just like the stars that drenched the rural skies—the stars she had forgotten about amidst the light pollution of cities and towns. And perhaps that was the problem, that amongst the glare of bitter words and the blaze of arguments that had lit up their nights, she had let herself forget what things with Henry had looked like before.

She traced her gaze up to Henry's eyes, and she offered him a soft smile and squeezed his hand. "Because, even if it hurts, and even if I'm missing them right now, and even if I sometimes say otherwise, I know that it was the right thing to do."

Henry gripped her hand. A squeeze that said he was there, that he wasn't her letting go.

Elizabeth turned back to Stevie. "Being with you guys, that's what I love; no matter where we are, that's my real home."

* * *

**Wednesday, 21st November, 2018**

**11:04 AM**

Elizabeth stopped. She stifled another yawn in the crook of her elbow, shook it off, and then returned to folding the grey terry cotton sweatshirt that she held out in front of her over the covers of the single bed. A second night of tossing and turning had left the duvet looking like pink waves of watered-down lemonade, and it felt as though her mind were drifting on that sea, a lurching rise and fall, bobbing from one thought to the next.

She crouched down and tucked the sweater into the top of the bag that rested at her feet, and as she did, her whole body ached, including muscles she didn't even know that she had, as though every fibre had been wound twice as tight. Perhaps coming off the sleeping pills so suddenly hadn't been such a wise idea after all, but Dr Sherman wasn't wrong: she couldn't keep taking them forever. At some point she had to move on, at some point she had to put this episode behind her, at some point she had to go home.

She knelt on the edge of the mattress, leant across the bed, and grabbed Henry's National War College tee from where it nestled into the gap next to the wall. But rather than folding it and adding it to the bag, she swivelled around so that she sat facing out into the room, into the gloom that the grey clouds that rucked the sky outside cast through the window, and she lifted the tee to her nose.

Henry's scent clung to the fibres, as though it had been woven into the fabric, and normally it would be enough to soothe her, to lift her, to carry her home, but right then, in that moment, something about it felt hollow. The smell itself hadn't changed, nor had it faded over the week-and-half since he'd left her at the clinic. Yet still there was something missing, as though the individual threads of his scent had wrapped themselves around a core of emptiness and had somehow incorporated that absence into their aroma.

She drew in another breath—empty, still—and then shook her head to herself and folded the tee into a rough square on her lap. She reached over to the bedside table, picked up his reading glasses, and slipped them inside the folds of cotton, and then she tucked the bundle into the bag. Things would get easier once she settled back into her routine. She would keep herself busy with work, and she would surround herself with Henry and the kids. And though it made her chest ache to the point that she felt hollow, a cavern on the brink of collapse, maybe Will had been right: _We survived without them, you'll find a way to survive without me too._

And as for everything else? The thought niggled at the back of her mind. But she pushed it away, sunk it beneath the sea of pink lemonade, and waited for other thoughts to rush in and take its place. Surely the fact that she could do that was proof enough that she would cope.

She eased up from the edge of the bed and then padded across the carpet towards the dressing table that nestled beneath the window sill. The shoulder of her cardigan slipped down, but she tugged it back into place, and then busied herself with dropping the makeup brushes, pot of foundation and tube of moisturiser that clustered in front of the mirror into the cosmetics bag. She was about to zip up the bag when—

_Rap-tap_.

She flinched at the knock on the door and the case slipped from her hand.

"Going somewhere, Bess?"

Her gaze reeled towards the reflection in the mirror. Conrad stood in the doorway, a vase of milk-yellow roses peeking through the pink starbursts of lilies cradled in the crook of one arm.

A frown gripped her brow, and she spun around. "Conrad? What the hell are you doing here?"

Conrad arched his eyebrows at her, whilst his chin dipped—a look that said although he'd come to expect nothing less from her, perhaps she might want to reconsider that greeting.

"And by that I mean: Good morning, Mister President."

His lips quirked into a subtle smile, a hint of amusement. "I thought something might've gotten lost in translation."

He lingered in the doorway, right on the edge between the bedroom and the hall, and a moment of silence drifted between them.

"Well, come in." She beckoned for him to step inside, and then leant back against the edge of the dressing table and zipped up the cosmetics case. "I wasn't expecting any visitors. Apparently you have to be a certain 'therapy level' in order to earn human contact."

He placed the brown paper bag that he held in one hand down at the end of the bed, and then set the vase of flowers atop the chest of drawers just inside the door. "Well, it seems to me there's a fairly simple way to rectify that."

He gave her a look, though the implication was already clear: _Just talk._

Her smile faltered, but she caught it before it could slip away altogether. She crouched down next to the bag, and stuffed the cosmetics case inside. "I did think about bribery, but I didn't bring any cash, and in my experience that kind of thing doesn't usually work on credit."

"So you thought you'd just go home instead?"

The bluntness caused her smile to drop. She straightened up and brushed her palms down over her jeans. The denim rasped against her skin. She clutched her hips, her fingernails digging in through her tee, and she met his eye. "I'm ready, sir." She gave a stilted shrug. "I thought I'd spend the weekend with Henry and the kids, then I'll be back at the office on Monday."

He eyed her as though he thought that were one of her more dubious ideas. Then he motioned to the padded stool tucked beneath the dressing table. "Take a seat, Bess. We need to talk."

She held her ground, and her grip on her hips tightened. "Well, unless you're about to tell me that World War Three has broken out, I think I'd rather not."

He tilted his head to one side. "Elizabeth—"

"And why do people start conversations like that anyway?" She tossed one hand up, her fingers flared. "I mean, what good has ever come of a conversation that starts with 'we need to talk'? The whole damn construct ought to be scrapped. That, along with 'Let's talk about your feelings' and just the concept of therapy in general. I mean, whatever happened to good old-fashioned stoicism, for crying out loud?"

Silence pulsed between them. Or perhaps it was just the throb of her blood.

Conrad continued to eye her with the same degree of caution, as though he were trekking across a minefield. One false step and—BOOM.

Her whole body deflated, and she sank back against the dressing table and curled her fingers over the edge of the oak. "Please tell me you're not serious."

He gave a slight shake of the head, a pitying look. "I can't reinstate you, Bess."

"But you're the president, you can do whatever the hell you want."

"Then perhaps I should rephrase. I won't reinstate you, not until you've been signed off."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to massage away the ache, but it felt as though someone had shaken the sea of pink lemonade, and now the pressure built as a thousand thoughts fizzled up. No job meant no distractions, nothing to occupy her mind, nothing to still her thoughts, just day after day spent sitting around the house, waiting, just waiting. And how long until—

_Fly or fall?_

A shudder crawled through her shoulders and up her neck. She took a hitch of breath and opened her eyes. Her gaze darted this way and that before it latched onto her toes, curled into the fibres of the beige carpet. Her nails were bare, not that she painted them often. It wasn't necessary. She didn't care. Nor did Henry, and even if he did, she couldn't say that it would make a difference. The only time she'd ever painted them regularly was when Stevie and Ali were growing up, and even back then she hadn't cared, but it presented an opportunity to talk to them. To lower their guard. To coax them into opening up. To bond with them. After all, who needed spy-craft when you had a bottle of nail polish?

The feeling faded like stars dissolving into the mute light of dawn.

"Bess?"

She let her hand drop back to the edge of the oak, and she looked up at Conrad, almost begging. "Conrad, I need this. I need to be back at work."

His lips drew into a firm line, and he shook his head. "I'm not going to budge on this, Bess. Do the therapy, get signed off, and then you can come back."

"But it's just a piece of paper." Her voice cracked. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Doesn't it?"

"Of course not. It just shows that I've said what they want to hear."

"Then you should have no difficulty in getting yourself signed off."

She stared at him, a scowl working its way across her brow, and as she did, the grey that crept in through the window behind her darkened and tipped the room into shadow. Part of her wanted to lash out, to list everything she had risked, everything she had given up, everything she had lost or almost lost because of him. Part of her wanted to blame him for this situation too.

But instead she hugged the fronts of her cardigan around her, until it felt as though she were shrinking in on herself, and she buried her hands inside the sleeves. Her scowl collapsed into a wince. "Please, Conrad, I'm asking as a friend."

"And as one of your oldest friends, someone who knows you and who cares about you, I'm saying no." Conrad pulled up the chair from the corner of the room, the spindle-back that the member of staff supervising her usually sat on. He lowered himself onto the seat, unbuttoning the front of his suit jacket as he did, and then he leant forward, his hands clasped in front of him. He stared into the distance for a long while before he finally lifted his gaze to meet her own. "You know, when Harrison first went to rehab, he'd been there about a week when we got a call from him, telling us that he was feeling much better, swore blind he'd never touch a drug again, promised us that he'd go to this meeting and that meeting, practically begged us to bring him home. Foolishly, Lydia and I believed him, and we went there and collected him, and sure enough, within a week he was high again. And… Well, I don't need to tell you the rest."

He gave her a wry smile and then shook it away with a sigh. His gaze lowered to the floor for a moment before it returned to hers. "I've always regretted that decision, thought maybe if we'd made him stick it out, made him do the psychological work, he'd have recovered years ago rather than going through cycle after cycle of recovery and relapse. And I suppose we all live with our regrets and what-ifs, but I'm not prepared to make the same mistake again now."

"Conrad." His name escaped in a rush of breath. She shook her head. "I'm not Harrison."

"No, you're not. You've got far more to lose, and you certainly don't give up when things get tough. Stay the course, Bess. Nip this thing in the bud." Before she could protest, he reached over, lifted the brown paper bag from the end of the bed, and held it out to her. "I got you these. The packaging's changed a lot in the last twenty-five years, the taste probably has too—God only knows what companies pour into goods these days—but the message is still the same."

She took the bag from him and unfolded the top; the paper was rough and it rustled beneath her fingertips. Inside was an orange cardboard box, not as bright as it had once been, but it tugged at her nonetheless. She let out a huff. "Ginger snaps."

"You did good in coming here, Bess." He braced himself against his thighs and pushed himself to his feet. "Now you've just got to see it through."

But she couldn't stay, she couldn't say the things that Dr Sherman needed to hear in order to sign her off. It was time to move on, it was time to put this behind her, it was time to go home. But without her job, without the distraction, what would she be returning home to?

Conrad rested his hand against her arm, just above the elbow. He gave a light squeeze, one that matched the warmth-disguised tautness of his smile. "Take care of yourself, Bess."

He lingered there for a moment, as though waiting for a response, though she had no response to give, not yet, not when it felt as though no matter what she did, stay or leave, she would lose. Then, after the moment had passed and still she had said nothing, he strode away, the tread of his footsteps soft against the carpet. But when he reached the door, he stopped.

"Oh and, Bess?" He waited for her to look up. "Remind me. The mirrors? In the entrance."

"Recursion." She placed the paper bag down on the dressing table behind her, and folded her arms across her chest. "The Droste effect."

Another flash of a smile. "That was it."

He stepped into the corridor, but halted when Elizabeth called after him.

"Conrad…" She tugged the folds of her cardigan tighter around her. "Do you ever wish you could go back?"

His eyes widened at first, as though in shock. Although there was nothing alarming about the question itself. Maybe after all those years, he thought she would never ask, or maybe it had simply hit a nerve. And maybe, on some level, that was what she had hoped for.

His expression hardened and he bowed his head. A deep frown settled across his brow. "I do, sometimes, perhaps more frequently of late." The frown eased and his gaze darted to meet hers. "And yourself?"

"Always." She nodded, and she fumbled the ends of her sleeves. "Though I don't know what point I would pick…or unpick."

The smile this time was no more than a flinch of the lips, and it lacked any true warmth. "Don't let this become one of those points, Bess. I'd hate for you, or for anyone else, to look back in a year's time and think 'What if?'."

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	39. Chapter Thirty-Seven: happiness, grat

**Chapter Thirty-Seven**

**…****happiness, gratitude, relief.**

**Elizabeth**

**11:24 AM**

Conrad's footsteps were still fading along the corridor when Russell barged into the room with a manila file tucked beneath one arm and his cell phone glued to his hand. "Why's there no signal in this place? It's like the Bermuda Triangle of cell reception."

"Good morning to you too, Russell. Please come in." Elizabeth pushed herself away from the edge of the dressing table, and then dragged out the padded stool that was tucked beneath it and slumped down onto the cushion. "You know, when I signed that consent form and named you as my second contact, I kinda hoped you'd be bringing me stuff that's work related, not biscuit-based interventions."

"The biscuits were his idea, if it were up to me he'd have threatened to fire you instead." Russell tossed his phone onto the duvet, and it sank into the pink waves of cotton. "Besides, you and I both know that, after our spouses, neither of us have a friend to name as a second contact."

She folded her arms across her chest and drew her chin back. "I have friends."

"You're in politics." He kicked the doorstop free and shot her a glance over his shoulder. "You have acquaintances and allies at best."

She paused, her lips pursed. _Not entirely untrue_. Friends had certainly fallen away over the years, and even before she took the job as secretary of state she would have struggled to name a second contact, and now with Will—. She pinched the inside of her arm through the sleeve of her cardigan, hard, like a screw twisting into flesh. Perhaps it would bruise.

Her gaze sharpened on Russell as he ushered the door into its frame. "I don't suppose there's any chance you can talk him round? Make him see sense."

"Who do you think talked him into it in the first place?"

She leant forward and braced herself against her knees. "Russell, he's comparing me to Harrison. His son. The _drug addict_." Her eyes bugged.

"And what does that tell you?"

"That this has been blown way out of proportion." She swept one hand up into the air, held his gaze for a long moment, and waited for any flicker of agreement. But his eyes remained cold, flint without a spark. She shook her head to herself and let her hand fall back to her lap. "Look, I had a bad night—"

His gaze raked over her. "Is that what you're calling it?"

"I let myself get overtired, but I'm fine now."

"Half the White House are hopped up on caffeine and sleep-deprivation, but you don't see them being put on suicide watch."

"I'm fine." Her tone sharpened. "They're not even extending my hold."

"Well, congratulations. You no longer meet the criteria to be committed. Is that really the bar you're setting for yourself?" He stared at her, his eyes wide, waiting for her answer. When none came, he gripped the top rail of the chair so tight that his knuckles peaked white, and he bowed his head. His voice strained, each word stressed. "You need to start taking this seriously, Bess."

Elizabeth's chin dipped, and her hair fell forwards so that its ends brushed against her cheeks. Her fingers and thumbs fumbled over the cuffs of her sleeves; the wool itched, like the way her nerves furred. "I said I'm fine."

Russell stepped around the chair and lowered himself onto the seat. He leant forward and sought her eye. "Talk to Dr Sherman, engage with the programme, get yourself out of this cave." He gestured to the room around them; with the lights switched off and the gloom that seeped in through the window, it brimmed with a murky haze. "Just play the game. Go to one of the yoga classes, or whatever the hell it is that they do here."

"I'm not in the mood, Russell."

"Why not?" He leant back, his hands held wide. "You do yoga at home, don't you?"

"So?"

"So, what's the difference?"

"The difference is that at home I can watch C-SPAN, and each position isn't suffixed with 'And how does this make you feel inside?'."

Russell paused. His gaze turned distant, as though she had just given him a glimpse into the Vestibule of Hell. "Well, I guess that would be off-putting."

"Then why can't you just talk him into reinstating me, seeing as you're the one who so helpfully talked him out of it?"

"Because I don't want to be one week down the line and find you cowering beneath your desk or yelling at foreign dignitaries."

"That happened _one_ time."

"And it's not going to happen again." He stared at her. Hard. "Sort yourself out, Bess, and when you're no longer a liability, you can come back. But there's no negotiating with us on this."

Seconds spun out and frittered into minutes. Elizabeth bit down on the inside of her cheek and fought to hold his gaze, whilst beneath her skin, currents stirred. She didn't have a problem, and there wouldn't be a problem if they'd just give her back her job.

Russell leant down and picked up the manila file that he had propped against the back leg of the chair. "Now, if you're finished with that, I need to talk to you about the poisoning."

Elizabeth shook her head, braced herself against her knees and eased to her feet. "I've already spoken to the FBI."

"Yes. I heard you scared off Agent Hayes by talking to him about your sex life."

Elizabeth snorted. "That guy? I have band tees older than him."

"I'm sure you do, and I have a strong stomach, so how about we skip the gory details of what you and Henry get up to in the bedroom, and get straight to the point. What do you remember?"

She turned her back on Russell and peered out of the window, into the gloom that hung over the garden at the back of the clinic. No black walnut tree, fortunately, just brittle leaves that skipped over the clipped lawn, like embers yearning to catch upon something and ignite. "Nothing."

"I'm not buying the whole amnesia act."

Her gaze darted to his reflection in the mirror. "Well, that's your problem, not mine."

"I've got some photographs here, pictures of the route you took to the restaurant, the restaurant itself, the route DS said you took to the hospital, the trauma bay. Everything from the moment you left State to the moment you collapsed." He peeled back the cover of the file. "I'd like you to take a look at them, see if they don't help jog your memory."

A prickle crawled up her spine and jarred her neck. She clenched her fists, until her fingernails bit into her palms and the flesh smarted. She turned to face Russell and leant back against the edge of the dressing table. "And if you're not going to reinstate me, I'd like you to leave." She nodded towards the door. "Now."

Russell studied her, but in a cursory way, the way one might look at a familiar text, and as his gaze flitted down to her fists, she forced them to relax. "I would've thought you'd want to catch who did this." He held out the stack of glossy A4 sheets, and when she made no move to take them, he flapped them at her, and they caught a shimmer of dim daylight from the window behind. "Just take a look. No harm in trying, right?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "I said: Now."

"I'll go. As soon as you've had a look." He flapped the photographs again, but she just hugged her arms even tighter. "Or I can sit here all day, if you like. I understand you won't be discharged until this evening at the earliest."

"You're not going to sit here all day. You and I both know you've got way better things to be doing, especially before a holiday weekend."

"You're right, I do. But, luckily for you, I've cleared my schedule, and there's no cell signal in this place, so the whole world could fall apart and I wouldn't know anything about it." He eased the photographs towards her, until the only way for her to avoid them was by looking up to the ceiling or by shutting her eyes altogether. "Look at the photographs, Bess. Unless you already know what they show and you're scared that they might trigger something…"

Elizabeth's jaw clenched. "I'm not scared. It's just a waste of time."

He arched back in his seat, his hands held out to the sides. "Because you're so abundantly occupied sitting in here doing nothing."

"Fine." She snatched the photographs from him.

She thumbed through the images, but softened her focus so that everything reduced to a blur. Yet still her breath tightened in her chest, and her head began to swim.

She pushed the pictures away again. "Nothing."

"Try again."

"Staring at photos isn't going to help."

"Just look at them, Bess."

Elizabeth stared down at the images again. She fought to keep a soft focus, to trap the pictures in that haze, but the colours and shapes and shades seeped through, and it felt as though the blood were ebbing away from her fingers and toes, away from her arms and legs, retreating into an ice-cold core, until each cell felt brittle and liable to crack.

"I can't." She shoved the pictures at Russell. "I can't remember."

Russell stared at her, and for a moment it felt as though he could see straight through her, as though maybe she really had cracked and he were witness to all the darkness that flooded out through the gap.

But then his expression softened, and he nodded. "Okay."

He took the photographs from her and stuffed them back into the manila file. He rose from his chair, fished a business card out from his inside jacket pocket and added that to the folder too before he placed it down on the seat. "Well, I'll leave them here with you, along with my direct number, just in case anything does come back to you."

She shook her head, and the words strained through gritted teeth. "You can't force me to remember, Russell."

Something in his eyes flared, and his voice shot up. "And you can't force yourself to forget."

She shrank back against the dressing table. The oak knocked against the wall behind.

Silence settled with fog-like thickness over the room, and with the door shut on the rest of the clinic, the only sound was the thud of her heart, a beat so hard that it felt as though it pressed through the walls of her chest and displaced the surrounding air.

Russell rubbed his brow and shook his head to himself, his other hand held up with palm exposed. "Just talk to Dr Sherman, Bess. Do the work."

He stepped away and snatched up his cell phone from the pit it had made in the duvet. "In the meantime, the FBI'll speak to your brother—as soon as he starts talking in coherent sentences, that is—and we'll see if this amnesia's a family trait."

And now the air pushed back. It slammed into her chest, knocked the breath from her lungs, and forced the word from her lips. "What?"

Russell stopped, one hand rested on the doorknob. He turned back and looked her up and down before realisation broke like a cold sweat. "She didn't tell you?"

"Will woke up?" The words fumbled off the tip of her tongue.

He gave a curt nod. "On Saturday. But you didn't hear it from me."

She slipped down from the edge of the dressing table and slumped onto the stool. Her mind whirred with snatches of thought, none more than a flitter, none coherent enough to trap. She looked up at him. "But…but…how?"

"A few hours after you got 'overtired' and checked yourself in here, the hospital got in touch about some pilot study in Germany, different poison, but same principle apparently—"

"But I found that study." She flung a gesture towards the door. "They said it wouldn't work."

"Then perhaps you should've been more insistent, rather than giving up on him and then giving up on everything else too."

The words stung, harder than a slap. If she had just hung on for a few more hours, if she had just gone back to bed rather than telling Henry the truth…

"This doesn't change anything, Bess. You fixed him. Now how about you try fixing yourself." Russell tugged the door open, and its bottom edge swept across the carpet with a grating rush. He jammed the doorstop back into place.

Whether he said goodbye or not, she didn't know. Even the sound of his footsteps fading down the corridor succumbed to the unfettered hush stirred up by the swarm of her thoughts.

When she imagined what it would feel like to learn that Will had woken up, she thought she would feel happiness, gratitude, relief. But now each of those words felt as hollow as the scent laced into Henry's tee, letters without meaning. And as for the feelings themselves…? Well, they felt just as empty. Like ghost towns, abandoned long ago, with homes weatherworn but still standing and cars rusted but still sitting on the drives, every presence drawing attention to the overwhelming absence, a shrine to what once had been but now was lost.

Instead, she felt dismay, and not the numb-tipped variety of adulthood, but the full thrust of its splinters driving through her ribs and causing everything inside her to collapse. Another hollow. It was bad enough that it was her fault that Will was in a coma in the first place, though given that she hadn't knowingly let him ingest the poison, she could assuage herself of just a fraction of that guilt. But failing to fight for him, failing to insist that the doctors give him the treatment…? He could have wasted the rest of his life in a coma, all because she had given up.

But worse than anything, the splinter to the heart, the part that stung the most, in the four days since he had awoken, she had resolved to move on, to go home and to forge a life without him. Nothing, especially not ignorance, could provide a salve for that.

Elizabeth stumbled across the room, kicked the doorstop free and shoved the door shut. She leant back against the wood and slid down until no one could see her, not even if they peered through the square window set into the door two-thirds of the way to the top. The light from the corridor crept through though, and disrupted by the slats, it fell in bars across the bed and the floor, her own little prison, trapping her with her thoughts. And if only her parents could see her now, what shame they would have felt.

Perhaps that was something else she should feel happy, grateful and relieved for. At least they hadn't lived to witness all of this, at least they had died before they could see her fail them like that.

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	40. Chapter Thirty-Eight: the Droste effe

**Note**: I know that the style of this chapter is a little different, given that most of it is a monologue. I find monologues pretty hard to pull off on the page, seeing as how so much of a monologue's success depends on the actor's expressions and intonation, which makes it far more suited to the screen. I hope it works for you though!

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**Chapter Thirty-Eight**

**…****the Droste effect.**

**Conrad**

**12:13 PM**

The boughs of the trees arched over the road, some leaf-bare, others still clinging to their crimson and gold and honeyed orange hues, whilst the grassy banks that curved along the edge of the tarmac veered more towards parched brown than the succulent greens that they would have seen just a few months before. Conrad stared out of the tinted window as the car sped along, but his mind was stuck in spring, a swirl of pink cherry blossom tumbling, nearly thirty years ago. _Conrad…Do you ever wish you could go back?_

Russell let out a bark of a laugh. "Well, would you look at that."

Conrad looked across to Russell, sat in the seat opposite, his face lit up with delight as he scrolled down the screen of his cell phone. "Got more than one bar on your phone, Russell?"

Russell shot him a look, one that said that if Conrad hadn't been the president, he would've told him where to go. "That too. But no. According to this, Senator Morejon's just announced that he's resigning effective immediately. Personal reasons, apparently."

Conrad let out a huff and shook his head to himself. "So, nothing to do with the media turning on him, not to mention the immense pressure he's getting from the party?"

"Whatever works."

"And his wife? I can't imagine things are looking too good for her."

Russell slipped his cell back into his jacket pocket. "I've had a word with DoJ, asked them to show a little leniency…for the time being, anyway."

"Wouldn't want to give up any leverage."

"That's a rather cynical point of view, sir."

Conrad arched his eyebrows at him. "With the added benefit of being true?"

"Let's just say it would be better for all parties involved if he were to let himself fall into obscurity with a little grace, rather than kicking and screaming the whole way down."

"Well, I suppose it's enough to deter him from digging any deeper into the situation with Bess." A light furrow settled across his brow as his thoughts returned to Elizabeth. "What did you make of her, by the way?"

Russell took a breath, one that he held for a second or two before he let it rush out in a sigh. "Well, she could still do with gaining a few pounds, that's for sure. Which reminds me, her staff want to send some of those red bean things she's always going on about." His gaze turned distant. "If only they'd pay as much attention to closing the BSR deal as they do to Korean baked goods."

"I meant, what do you make of her mood?"

"It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see that something's not right. Either something'll happen that'll force her to confront this, or she'll keep treading water, but she'll always be a liability."

"Some people spend their whole lives treading water."

"True. But one absence is a nightmare enough; we can't afford for it to happen again."

"You still want to bring someone else on at State?"

Russell's lips flinched. At the surface the look held all the nonchalance of a shrug, but as it lingered, something murkier and harder to define simmered underneath. "As much as Cushing would love the job, he's not a long-term solution, and unless Bess starts taking this seriously, we have to consider what's right for the administration, not to mention your legacy."

Conrad's jaw tightened. Spots of rain flecked the window. A second or so passed. Then the swish and thunk of the wipers, slightly muffled by the partition, kicked in. "Let's give her a few days, see if our visit has any impact."

"And if not?"

"Then I guess we'll have to talk options."

The gloom outside darkened, as though a second layer of tint had been applied to the glass. It pressed down upon the fields, with their blades of grass thrusting upwards in spikes of rusted brown, slim-needled daggers ready to skewer the drops of rain as they fell. The tracks of mud that stretched across the field narrowed towards the spindling trees of the woods on the far side, like the paths people walked in life, once so broad that they seemed endless, but soon enough tapering to a single point on the horizon. The gloom didn't stop there, though. It clouded the lens on Conrad's memories too. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it just brought them into painfully sharp focus.

Conrad stared out of the window as he spoke, though his gaze sailed far beyond the landscape. "I remember the first time I met Bess, back when she was still an Adams. It must've been spring, because I remember the cherry blossoms were in bloom, and the air carried the scent of frangipane. I found her sat on a bench in the grounds of UVA, beneath one of those trees, legs crossed, a book balanced open in the palm of one hand. She'd been flagged as a potential recruit by her mathematics professor, and academically speaking, she more than fit the bill, but it was my job to approach her and to get a read on her, to see if I thought she'd be suitable for the job.

"I asked her if it was all right for me to join her, and she said yes. We sat in silence for a while, a minute or two, maybe more, she reading, me watching out of the corner of my eye. And then I asked her about the book. It seemed as good a place to start as any. She told me it was _La Disparition_ by Georges Perec, the original French version, though she'd read the German translation too. I asked why not the English translation, and she explained that no one had achieved it yet, or if they had, it hadn't been published. I asked her what she meant. I mean, if she was able to read and understand it as an English speaker, a translation must have been straightforward enough. But then she explained that it was a lipogram—written without the letter 'e'—which led on to a discussion on Oulipo, which led on to language and mathematics, then mathematics and art. Somewhere in there she explained recursion to me and gave the example of the Droste effect."

Conrad paused. The rhythm of the windscreen wipers in the background thickened the hush, until it felt as though he could breathe it in. A lungful of silence.

Then a frown unfurled across his brow.

"I think the thing I remember the most about that conversation isn't anything in particular that she said, and I'd be hard-pushed to explain any of it anyway. No. It was the way that she lit up. She could've spoken for hours without me having the foggiest what she was talking about, but still I would've listened, because the way she spoke made every word feel important. It was that passion. Something so raw, so honest."

Another pause, longer this time. His frown deepened as the look on her face as she sat beneath the cherry blossom tree that day juxtaposed itself with the expression she wore at the clinic. Pained, drained, not so much as a flicker of that light. The anger and lashing out he could take, but the hurt, the way that she had begged…

He waited for the image to pass, for his frown to ease and fade.

"We spoke about her courses too and how she came to be at UVA. I already knew about her background, having lost her parents so young, but it felt important to see how she broached the topic. She seemed a little guarded, became quite matter of fact, but it didn't raise any alarm bells. If anything it intrigued me how quickly she could shut those emotions off, and how she proceeded to steer the conversation by asking me about myself. So, I gave her my cover story, the usual patter we fed to potential recruits about being a visiting scholar, nothing related to their subjects, of course, and she showed polite interest in that.

"We must have been talking for—oh, I don't know—thirty minutes, maybe more. The time went so fast. And then her boyfriend showed up."

Conrad arched his eyebrows. "He didn't like the look of me at all, and he made no effort to hide it. He seemed the sort to get jealous if someone so much as glanced at her the wrong way, and some strange man talking to his girlfriend when there were plenty of other benches available, well, he didn't like that one bit. So she made her excuses, said it was nice to meet me, all the usual pleasantries. And that was that."

Russell's cell phone bleeped, but he silenced it, his gaze remaining heavy on Conrad.

"They were almost at the end of the path, when I noticed that she'd left her book behind. I thought about calling after her or trying to catch them up, but I couldn't recall if she'd told me her name or if I just knew it from her file and they were already so far ahead, so I thought it best to leave it. She'd miss it at some point, and it'd be waiting for her when she came back.

"And sure enough, less than three minutes later, she came jogging along the path. I held the book out to her, and she gave me a quick smile and thanked me, but then, rather than running after the boyfriend, who no doubt would be anxious to get her back, she sat down again and said that she wanted to ask me a question. I said okay. No harm in that. But then she looked straight at me, or through me might be more accurate, and said, _I've got a pretty good feeling you're from the CIA, so my question is, how does this work? What do I have to do if I want the job?_"

Russell let out a snort of a laugh. "Trust Bess."

Conrad gave a nod, conceding to that. "'Shocked' doesn't even begin to cover it. I'd been working at the Company for over a decade, and not once had my cover been blown, yet this young woman had been speaking to me for just over half an hour and already she had me figured out."

"So, how did she know?" Russell asked.

"She never told me what it was that gave me away, though she once joked that not even an academic would be seen dead in that much tweed." Conrad gave a wry smile, and then as it faded, he tipped one finger towards Russell, his eyebrows raised. "One thing was for certain: I'd have hired her right then and there if I could."

The car picked up speed as they reached an open expanse of highway, and the drone of the tyres over the tarmac hummed through the vehicle.

"I met with her a couple more times before making my recommendation to my superiors. I told them that she wasn't just smart, she was sharp; not only did she have instinct and skills, but she knew how to use them; and she had a handle on her emotions that I hadn't seen in others her age. Of course, the issue of her history came up, but I argued that if anything, it was an advantage. Losing her parents so young had toughened her, and it meant that there were fewer relationships to exploit and that she had nothing to tie her down. The only foreseeable problem was the boyfriend, but a guy like that probably wouldn't stick around long anyway."

Conrad's gaze locked on Russell's, and he leant forward in his seat, as much as the seat belt would allow. "I saw Bess for what she was, for what she would become. A highly competent agent, someone with immense potential and talent, someone we had to have working for the CIA."

He stopped. Took a deep breath. His gaze fell away.

"But looking back now, I see how blind I was." He fought to meet Russell's gaze. "She was a young woman, no more than a girl really, who'd already seen more than her fair share of trauma. Losing her parents had shaped her, there's no denying it, and perhaps that's what made her so perfect. But it makes me sick to think that I ever saw it as an advantage. It makes me sick to think that I used it for my benefit, all the while referring to it as a 'skill set'. She was a traumatised young woman, and I knew it, but I took her, and I used her, and since then I've put her through trauma after trauma after trauma. And I try and persuade myself that this is the job she signed up for, but she sure as hell never signed up for this."

He flung one hand into the air, as though a single gesture could encapsulate all that had come to pass since the day that she was poisoned, as though it could sum up the desperation in her eyes when she had told him: _Conrad, I need this._

He shook his head to himself, though the feeling wouldn't fade.

"And I was wrong about the boyfriend too. He's stuck by her for thirty-odd years. And it turns out maybe he was right to be so protective of her, maybe he always knew that people would try to use her and that she'd never have the instinct to protect herself."

He leant back in his seat, and stared out of the window once more. Though what passed beyond that tinted glass, he couldn't say.

"I'll never forget the sight of her sat on the bench beneath that cherry tree, legs crossed, book balanced open in the palm of one hand. I knew then the hand that life had dealt her. I knew how much she had suffered. I knew how much she had lost. Yet in that moment she looked so peaceful, so content. She had no idea what was about to hit her, what path meeting me would lead her down, how much she would risk because I told her she could make the world a better place. And now it's come to this, and I find myself asking: Should I have walked away?"

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**Thoughts are appreciated. : )**


	41. Chapter Thirty-Nine: the real truth

**Chapter Thirty-Nine**

**…****the real truth.**

**Elizabeth**

**2:03 PM**

The gloom seeped through the blind and suffused the therapy room with a grungy pink haze, whilst raindrops spat at the window pane behind. The door swooshed open, and Elizabeth stilled the jitter that bounced through her knee and she pushed herself up from the couch.

"Elizabeth." Dr Sherman stepped into the room. "Sarah said you missed lunch—"

"Will woke up."

Dr Sherman froze.

For a moment, time did too.

"Will woke up." Elizabeth's voice cracked. "And you didn't say anything."

Dr Sherman's smile strained as she eased towards the armchairs opposite the couch and placed the ring binder down onto one of the seats; the black cover clashed with the passive pink upholstery. "Russell told you."

"What's it matter who told me? The fact is you didn't." Elizabeth tugged at the fronts of her cardigan and wrestled the folds of wool tighter around her, only for them to fall away again as she tossed her hand up. "How am I meant to trust you, how am I meant to work with you, when you've been hiding the truth from me?"

Dr Sherman perched against the arm of the chair. She shook her head, just enough to set the gold hoops of her earrings swaying. "Trust and demanding the truth aren't the same thing."

Elizabeth snorted. "Nice aphorism."

"We trust that people will tell us the truth we need to hear, when we need to hear it." Dr Sherman's gaze hardened as it locked on Elizabeth. "I'm sure you don't need me to explain that."

"There's a big difference between me keeping state secrets in the name of national security, and you letting me believe that my brother's still languishing in a coma."

"Is there?"

Elizabeth baulked. "Of course."

"Part of my job here is to keep you safe. What if I'd told you the second that he'd woken up, only for him to get worse again, which he might well have. Given your reaction to the situation so far, would that be keeping you safe?"

Elizabeth held Dr Sherman's gaze for a long moment. Perhaps it was a kindness of sorts, but it felt more like a convenient excuse. A deception. A betrayal. But whatever it was, it didn't matter. She crossed her arms over her chest, and shaking her head to herself, she paced the carpet behind the back of the couch. "I should've been there with him. He would've been confused and frightened."

"There were nurses and doctors there, and Henry went to the hospital too."

Elizabeth stopped and spun back to face Dr Sherman. "But I'm his sister. I should've stayed with him. I shouldn't have given up."

The words shot into the room and chiselled out a silence.

Elizabeth continued to stare at Dr Sherman. Her gaze bored into her as though, if she were to drill deep enough, she might find agreement behind the impassive facade, a welcome weight to add to the guilt that already dragged her down like a sack of sand, one grain for every second that had passed since she had woken up to find out that Will had not. Perhaps that could be her new anchor, enough to tether her to the here and now.

She gripped the back of the couch, her fingertips pitting into the textured leather, and as she hunched forward and bowed her head, her hair fell in a veil across either side of her face. Though her voice softened, it lost none of its edge. "I'm leaving. Tonight."

A pause stretched between them, an empty chasm that yawned across the room. The rain continued to patter against the window, and even the roar of gravel beneath tyres and the scrunch of it beneath footsteps had a damp feel, as though the water had soaked into everything, even sound.

"If you leave—"

"You won't sign me off, I know."

"And the president—"

"Won't reinstate me, I know."

"And you're sure that's what you want?"

Elizabeth shook her head, and the ends of her hair quivered, a jarring tickle against her cheeks. "I need to be there for my brother."

"He's already got plenty of support, and from what I understand, his moments of consciousness are still only brief. If you were to stay here—"

Elizabeth's head snapped up, and her gaze sharpened on Dr Sherman. "Are you seriously suggesting that it's okay for me not to be there with him because he's so out-of-it that he won't notice whether I'm there or not?"

"I'm suggesting that it's better for you to stay here and address your issues—"

"Issues? What issues?"

Dr Sherman paused, her mouth open. She waited for Elizabeth to stop and to hold to her silence, as though she expected a tirade at any moment. Then she gave a gentle smile, almost coaxing. "To process this trauma, before it turns into anything else. And I think your brother would understand and would appreciate that."

"This isn't going to turn into anything else. And you obviously don't know Will."

Dr Sherman lifted the folder from the seat and settled onto the cushion. With the file rested in her lap, she leant back, and clasped her hands in front of her. "So, tell me about him."

"He's a total douche."

She arched her eyebrows. "Yet you're willing to give up your job for him?"

Elizabeth picked at the seam in the leather cushion. She gave a shrug. "He's my brother."

"So, once again, you're going to put his needs before your own."

"I've already told you, I'm not talking about that. And besides, I don't need this job anyway."

"I thought you liked your job."

"I liked working at the CIA, and I liked academia too." Elizabeth shrugged again, a little more forced this time. "I'll move on, I'll find something else."

"And why did you give up those jobs?"

Elizabeth stopped plucking at the leather.

Dr Sherman continued to stare at her, her lips curved into a smile a touch too saccharine. _You catch more flies with honey_. "Who did you give them up for? Yourself? Or someone else?"

Elizabeth swallowed, whilst the voices echoed through her mind completely unbidden. First Henry's, '_If you go to Baghdad, I don't know what things will look like when you come back._' And then Conrad's, '_I know you won't let me down, Bess, and I won't take no for an answer._'

She shook her head, shook the words away before they had time to fester. "No choice is made in a vacuum." She paced around the end of the couch and then slumped down onto the cushions; they deflated and moulded around her. "And anyway, Will isn't asking me to quit. You're the one who won't sign me off."

"I can't put my name to something I don't believe in, no more than I'd expect you to."

"What's there to believe in? I'm fine. I'm fit for work. I can cope."

Dr Sherman leant forward, and the silver chain of her necklace swayed away from the loose skin of her throat. "Then tell me about that day."

Elizabeth paused, and in the lull, a prickle crawled up from the pit of her stomach and spread through her like fingers of frost, ready to seize her and haul her down. But she pushed it back—she could cope—and when she spoke, she smoothed out the edge that threatened to sharpen her voice and she held her tone level. "I don't remember, so there's nothing to talk about."

"I understand that Russell wanted to speak to you regarding the FBI investigation."

"He did, but I'm afraid I wasn't much help."

"And how did it make you feel? Talking with him about that."

Elizabeth shrugged. "Fine. Though I'm guessing that's not the answer you want."

Dr Sherman's eyebrows arched, two thin lines. "Conversely, that's exactly the answer I want."

"Yet you still won't sign me off."

"I would if I believed it to be true."

Elizabeth gave a low snort. "I hardly think you're in the position to lecture me on truth."

The patter of rain against the window hardened, like needles of ice thrusting into the glass.

Dr Sherman's smile faltered, and though she caught it, its warmth drained away. She shrank back against the cushion of the armchair, and her gaze dipped to the file in her lap for a moment before she met Elizabeth's eye once more. "How've you been sleeping since coming off the medication?"

"A little disrupted on Monday. But last night?" A half-shrug. "Fine."

"And your mood?"

Elizabeth turned her head from side to side, another shrug. "Fine."

Dr Sherman opened up the file and slipped one of the questionnaires out from the plastic pocket. She closed the file again, laid the sheet of paper along with her rollerball pen on top, and then pushed it across the coffee table. "You know the drill."

Elizabeth eased to the edge of the couch and picked up the folder. With it balanced in her lap, she skimmed through the questions. The nib of the pen rasped over the paper with each tick. She couldn't remember what responses she had given before, but it didn't matter, not really, so long as the number at the end was the same, so long as it added up to her being allowed to leave.

With the questionnaire completed, she pushed the folder back across the table, and it skidded to a stop halfway across the glass. "So, what time can I go?"

Dr Sherman studied the responses; her voice turned distant as she did so. "I understand that your last dose was around 11pm on Sunday, or at least that's when it was logged, and we normally say seventy-two hours—"

"Great." Elizabeth pressed her fists into the cushion on either side of her and pushed herself up from the couch. "I'll be ready at eleven o'clock."

"Elizabeth." Dr Sherman held up one hand and gestured for her to stop. She motioned to the questionnaire in her lap. "Is this really what you want?"

Elizabeth's gaze flitted to the piece of paper, with its black lines all adding up to the number circled at the top. Not too high, not too low. Her gaze lingered there for a moment before it returned to Dr Sherman. "What I want is my life back. I want to be there for my family, I want to be there for my brother, I want to go back to work."

"Then that's what we all want." Dr Sherman shook her head, and the gold hoops glinted. "But leaving now isn't going to achieve that."

"Won't it?" Elizabeth pulled the fronts of her cardigan around her, and then pinned them in place by folding her arms across her chest, her fists tucked beneath her elbows. "I'll be at home with my family, I can spend time at the hospital, I can help Will recover…"

"And your work?"

"Either Conrad will come round eventually, or there'll be some disaster that he needs me to sort out, and if not…" Elizabeth's shoulders rose higher and higher, and then slumped. "…as I said, I'll find another job."

"And this—" Dr Sherman held up the sheet of paper. "Is this your life before?"

Elizabeth gave a taut smile. It wasn't her life now. "I'll feel better once I'm home."

"And if you don't? If you feel worse? Will you reach out?"

Elizabeth nodded. Adamant. "Of course."

Dr Sherman slipped the questionnaire into the file. When she looked up at Elizabeth, a line of tension gripped the middle of her brow, a break from the usual calm facade. "I think perhaps you ought to stay here tonight. Eleven o'clock is a little late—"

"And then tomorrow's the start of the holiday weekend, which means there won't be the right administrative staff, which means I'll have to stay here until Monday. And then there'll be another excuse, and another, and another." Elizabeth paced backwards towards the door. "I know how these things work."

"And you know my concerns?"

"I do." Elizabeth hauled open the door, and the seal broke with a rasping rush. "But I'll be fine, and I'll be ready at eleven o'clock."

_Elizabeth placed her final card down on the heap in the middle of the kitchen table. Her smile widened as the card released a crisp snap. "One King. And I'm out."_

_"__No. No way." Jason shook his head. "I'm calling it. Total BS."_

_Elizabeth arched an eyebrow at him. "Really? You wanna go there?"_

_Jason's look hardened. "BS, and you know it."_

_"__Fine." She gave a nonchalant shrug. "But it's your funeral." She reached for the card at the top of the pile. Her fingertips tacked to the plastic coat, ready to turn it. But then she stopped. She looked to Jason again. "You sure you don't want to change your mind?"_

_"__B. S."_

_Another shrug. "If you say so." She paused for a second longer, her gaze fixed on Jason, and then she turned over the card. Her smile stretched twice as wide as before, whilst Jason's expression fell into utter dismay. "One King, just like I said."_

_Stevie let out a cackle, whilst Jason grumbled and scooped the pile of cards towards him._

_Henry clunked the bowl of popcorn down and slid it towards the middle of the table. "How many times do I have to tell you? Don't play Cheat with someone who can beat a polygraph."_

_He gripped Elizabeth's shoulders and squeezed until she squirmed, and then he loosened his hold, smoothed his palms over her upper arms and pressed a kiss to the top of her head before he sank down into the seat next to her._

_Alison looked to Elizabeth. "Can you really?"_

_"__Duh. She's ex-CIA." A scowl had settled across Jason's brow whilst he sorted through his stack of cards, at least half the deck. "They probably teach them that on day one."_

_"__But how'd you do it? Is there some kind of trick?"_

_Elizabeth snatched up a palmful of popcorn and tossed the pieces into her mouth one at a time. The warm salt tingled across her tongue. "You can pass anything off as the truth, so long as you believe it yourself. But keeping track of which truths are real or not? Now, that's the real trick."_

_Stevie shot her an incredulous look, one that called BS on everything Elizabeth had just said. "Then how come you're such a rubbish liar?"_

_"__That's her double game." Henry patted Elizabeth's thigh. "Lull you into a false sense of security."_

_Elizabeth looked to him, and her brow furrowed. "Strange."_

_Henry frowned too, a hint of concern. "What is it?"_

_"__Oh, nothing." She shook her head. "It's just that the other night, we got to talking—I can't remember what about—and my other husband said the exact same thing."_

_Henry's expression dropped, just for a moment._

_And though she could have suppressed her laugh, could have kept that deadpan going all day, she didn't want to. It was just too good. "God, Henry. Your face."_

_"__Right, that's it." Henry lunged for her, and she squealed and tried to back away as he tickled her, but her breath was lost to the laughter and the cries for him to stop._

_Alison rolled her eyes. "And I thought we were meant to be the teenagers."_

Elizabeth ambled along the corridor and towards her room, her toes softly tacking against the tract of mute pink linoleum with every step. The gloom that crept in through the windows had softened, no longer imposing, but instead just part of the air, whilst the patter of raindrops blurred from a staccato into a background hum. As she walked, a sense of calm washed over her; the same calm she felt each time her plane touched down and taxied along the tarmac and she knew it was only a matter of minutes, or maybe hours, until she would be back at home.

Eleven o'clock. That was her focus. She would go home. She would be fine. She would feel better. She would help Will recover. She would find another job. She would cope.

No matter what anyone else thought or said, that was the truth, the real truth.

She could be certain of that.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**And thank you to everyone who's left a comment! Please take a minute and let me know what you think.**


	42. Chapter Forty: damage control

**Chapter Forty**

**…****damage control.**

**Stevie**

**2:04 PM**

_'__After news broke on Sunday that Senator Carlos Morejon's wife, Victoria Morejon, worked in the United States illegally when she first came to the country, Senator Morejon has today announced that he will be resigning from his post, effective immediately, citing 'personal reasons'. We approached Senator Morejon for further comment, but he declined…'_

Stevie stared up at the television screen mounted on the wall in the corner above the drinks station whilst she stirred the brown sugar crystals and a dash of milk into her coffee. The spoon clinked against the inside of the mug with each cycle. The camera cut to the panel, ready to discuss the turn in events, or to chew over the carcass more likely—though that much Senator Morejon probably deserved—but before the feast could begin, Stevie tossed the spoon into the sink with a clatter, and then snatched up her mug and strode away.

She sailed along the corridor and back towards the office, flashing a strained smile at each staffer and official that she met on her way. At least with the attention on Morejon, no one was so much as mentioning her mother's absence, and it couldn't hurt that him quitting meant that she no longer had to worry about him skulking around White House corridors or accosting her when she was on her lunch break. But what if the media found out about her mother, about where she was staying and why? The circle of people who had been read in was slowly expanding—no thanks to Jason telling Aunt Maureen—and all it would take was one slip, one misplaced word, and once the press got wind of it, they'd make the feast over Morejon look like no more than a snack.

Stevie strode past the side door to Russell's office, and then stopped. She backed up two paces, and with the mug clutched against her chest so that the warmth of the ceramic pressed through her blouse, she peered inside.

Russell was stooped over the desk. A heavy frown furrowed his brow whilst he glowered down at the three files splayed open in front of him. _Not_ the files she had left for him earlier. He straightened up and massaged his forehead, and the glass casing of his watch threw off a glint of white light. Then his shoulders pricked and his gaze whistled around. When it landed on Stevie, he flipped the covers of the files shut, jostled them together and placed them beneath the binder at the far side of the desk. "Miss McCord… How can I help you?"

"You're back." Stevie shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

Russell shot her a look as he lowered himself into his office chair. "Well observed."

A tingle of warmth crept through her cheeks. "It's just, I thought you'd be gone longer, when you said that we should clear your schedule…"

"Yes, well, things didn't take as long as I'd planned." He smoothed down his tie, and then dragged himself up to the edge of the desk. He grabbed the stack of memos from his in-tray and tossed aside the pallid pink paperclip that fastened them together.

As he flicked through the pages, the rustle of the paper mingled with the erratic patter of raindrops against the windowpanes and thickened the silence that settled across the room. When he had given each memo a cursory look, he returned to the one at the top, and without so much as a glance in her direction, he said, "You're hovering."

Stevie pursed her lips. A pause. Then—"Well observed."

That earnt her another look, but also a huff of a laugh.

She switched her coffee into the opposite hand, and then crept a step further inside. "So…I saw that Senator Morejon's resigned… It's all over the news."

"Yes, that was rather felicitous."

She pushed the door to with a soft click, and then sidled closer, half-step by half-step. "So, it had nothing to do with the threat you made last week, or needing to speak to my dad on Saturday?"

"That's quite the imagination you've got there, almost as active as Morejon's."

She came to a stop behind one of the armchairs that faced his desk, and rested the mug against the back, whilst her other hand curled over the leather. "You know how my mom feels about oppo."

"I do." He turned over the page, a furrow of concentration marking his brow.

She bunched her lips to one side. "So… Did you tell her? When you and President Dalton made an off-the-books trip to see her this morning."

Russell's gaze shot up, and his eyebrows arched in a flash of surprise that lingered for no more than a second before he shook it away again. "Remind me again why I hired you."

"I think it had something to do with me saving your life."

"Well, I'm beginning to regret that."

"Hiring me, or me saving your life?"

"The way things are going at the moment?" His gaze drifted up from the page, his eyes glazed. "Both." Then he tossed the memos onto the desk so that they slapped against the wood, and he leant back in his seat and rubbed his brow, his eyes clenched shut.

Stevie rounded the chair and sank down onto the cushion; she perched at the edge, the mug of coffee clutched atop her knees. She waited until Russell's hand fell to the arm of the chair and he had blinked open his eyes again before she asked, "What's happened?"

"Nothing's happened. That's the problem." Russell snatched his takeaway coffee cup from the desk, and then leant back again. "For some reason, your mother's refusing to talk, except to say God only knows what to the president and to put him in such a funk that the whole car journey back was like sitting across from Eeyore just moments after he's been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Which means that not only do we still have no leads on who's behind the assassination attempt, but soon I'll have to find someone to replace her."

Stevie's gaze drifted to the files he had hidden beneath the binder, and then back to him. Though the heat through the mug had started to sear her fingertips, her grip on it tightened. "But why won't she talk? Doesn't she want to get better?"

"She is better, apparently. Everything's fine and she lives in a land where it's always spring and the flowers pick themselves." He took a swig of coffee and then balanced the paper cup against the armrest, whilst his gaze turned distant, as though he were staring through the memos and through the wood beneath, and possibly through the floor below that too.

In the silence, the patter of the rain picked up, and it prickled through the air and over Stevie's skin. Going to the clinic was meant to make her mother better, that—along with Uncle Will waking up—was meant to be the solution.

Russell's shoulders slumped in a soundless sigh. His gaze sharpened as it returned to hers. "Look, I don't want you to worry about her. You're not even meant to know that we visited."

"But I do know, and it's hard not to worry about her when my dad said she was suicidal."

"Well, I don't think she's contemplating the great existential question anymore."

"But she's still not herself?"

He held her gaze for a long moment, and then gave a slight shake of the head.

Somehow, that movement cut deeper than if he had simply said, 'No'.

She ran her thumbs back and forth along the rim of the mug whilst she searched the desk, as though somewhere hidden amidst the stacks of files, pieces of stray paper and discarded ballpoint pens there might lie the solution, the real solution. There had to be something they could do, something more productive than just wait and see, something better than: _Sink or swim?_

Her gaze snapped back up to Russell. "Maybe I could visit her, try talking to her. I know that we're not supposed to, but seeing as it's Thanksgiving tomorrow—"

"No."

She stopped, her tongue poised and her lips still curled around the vowel sound. Then her lips clenched into a bud, and a frown crumpled her brow. "Why not?" She swept her hand towards the door, eliciting a clink from the gold-plated bangles around her wrist. "You went."

"I did."

"So why can't I go?"

"Because…" Russell pivoted back and forth in his chair, and then came to an abrupt stop. "She's thinking about leaving. Against her therapist's advice, and against any kind of rational judgement."

"Even more reason for me to go. Maybe I can talk some sense into her."

"The answer's still no."

Her frown deepened. She leant forward in her seat, and her eyes narrowed on Russell. "You don't think I can do it, do you? You think that if I go, I'll end up bringing her home."

"The thought had crossed my mind."

"Well, I won't. I'm not a child, Russell."

"No, you're not." Russell placed his coffee cup down on the desk with a hollow tap, and then pushed himself up from his seat and looked down at her. "But you are her daughter."

"And your point is?" Her gaze tracked him as he strode towards the mini refrigerator, opened the door so that its yellowed hum flooded out, and snatched a bottle of mineral water from the middle shelf.

"If you go and see her now, first she'll tell you that she's fine and that she's ready to come home. Then when you say no, she'll start to beg. Then when you refuse again—" He shot her a glance over his shoulder. "—that is, if you have the common sense and strength to refuse—she'll get mean. She'll shout, she'll curse, she'll say things that no mother ought to say to her daughter all in an effort to manipulate you into bringing her home." He leant back against the refrigerator, twisted off the plastic cap, and took a swig from the bottle. "So, no, you won't go, because you shouldn't have to deal with that, and if she was better—properly better—she sure as hell wouldn't want you to."

"Oh…" Her frown fell away. "So…you're trying to protect me?"

He shot her a look, one that said—_Don't push it._

"It's just damage control." He strode back to the office chair and sank down into the seat. "If you want to do something to help, try visiting your uncle. See if you can get him talking and making sense."

"I thought you said fixing him won't help her."

"It won't, but it might help us work out who poisoned them and stop them from trying again." He returned to the memos and his tone became distant, imbued with a touch more gravel. "Needless to say, your mother's got a far better chance of getting her head together if she's actually alive to do so."

Stevie shifted in her seat. "You think there might be another attempt?"

"I think that if whoever did this was just trying to make a statement, they would've claimed responsibility by now, given all the disruption they've caused. The fact that they're keeping quiet makes me think that things are still going on that they don't want us to find out about."

She took a sip of coffee, now lukewarm. "And what do the FBI think?"

"They don't have a clue."

She grimaced as she swallowed. "Well, that's reassuring."

Russell lowered the memos, and his gaze flitted over her. "Look, your mom's safe while she's at the clinic. She's out of the public eye, and so long as no one knows where she is, they can't get to her… And it doesn't hurt that she can't get to herself."

"And if she leaves?"

"Let's hope we don't find out."

The words hung heavy in the silence, like the grey clouds that weighed down the sky outside, and in the same way, they filled the air with a gloom, one that spoke less of sunlight being disrupted and felt more like an omen of things yet to come.

"Stevie." He massaged his brow. "Your father can't know that we visited her."

"Why not?"

"Because he told me not to."

She took another sip of coffee and stared at him over the rim. "But you went anyway."

"It's not up to him."

"And what?" She lowered the mug to her lap. "You're worried that he'll be mad?"

He pulled a face. "Of course not, I'm not twelve."

"Then why can't he know?"

"I don't want him taking it up with the clinic and making things…_difficult_…going forward."

She paused, but only for a second or two before she nodded. "Okay."

He frowned. "What? No ethical debate?"

"Do you want an ethical debate?"

"Not really, no."

She stared down into her coffee, whilst the toll from the grandfather clock in the corner slowed and then juddered into reverse. A few weeks ago, she would have refused, she would have said that hiding the truth was a deception, just as bad as lying itself. But perhaps if she had chosen differently back then, perhaps if she hadn't been so afraid to open her eyes to the possibility that her mother was struggling, someone could have prevented the situation they found themselves in right now and her mother wouldn't have needed to hit rock-bottom before she reached out. And what she would think in a few weeks' time, she couldn't know, but in that moment, the line between right and wrong felt as concrete as the border between time zones, something utterly intangible and self-imposed. But there was one thing that she did know—

"Look—" She lifted her gaze to meet Russell's, and she offered him a broad yet strained smile. "I just want her to get better, for her to be how she was before, and I have to believe that you do too, so if keeping quiet about something that I'm not even meant to know about helps, then I'm okay with that."

Russell studied her for a moment. Then his frown lifted and he gave a curt nod. "Good."

When he returned to the paperwork, Stevie took that as her cue to leave. She eased up from her chair and was halfway across the room to the outer office when—

"Stevie…" Russell called out.

She turned back to face him. Her fingers fluttered against the mug clutched to her chest.

"This _business _with Morejon…"

"Did it have to do with damage control?"

His gaze turned distant, and though his eyes were unreadable as ever, with their painstakingly applied ceramic tint, when he looked up at her, for a moment the glass fell away and a glimmer of light shot through. "Prevention, yes."

"Then I'm okay with that too."

* * *

**Thank you for reading and reviewing!**

**Thoughts, please. : )**


	43. Chapter Forty-One: any deal is better

**Chapter Forty-One**

**…****any deal is better than no deal.**

**Jay**

**3:07 PM**

The plastic handset sweated against Jay's cheek. He swapped the phone to the opposite ear and wedged it against his shoulder. His voice strained as he fought to keep his tone level. "Well, we wouldn't have to go to mediation if you'd just be reasonable."

A _rap-rap-rap_ against the glass jarred through him. The door swooshed open and flooded the room with the lilt of chatter, the clatter of fingertips striking keys and the trills of telephones from the outer office. Kat leant into the doorway, causing the hot pink star that emblazoned the tip of her tie to swing forward, and she tapped at her watch, her eyebrows arched.

Jay pushed up the cuff of his shirt sleeve and glanced at his own watch—the glare of the light overhead clouded its face—and then he rubbed his brow. "Look, can we talk about this later? I'm late for a meeting, and—"

The phone cut out, and the drone of the dropped line kicked in.

Jay lowered the handset and stared at it for a long moment whilst a frown worked its way across his brow. He shook his head to himself and clunked the phone back into the cradle. "Or just hang up, because that's clearly the mature, adult thing to do."

"Dare I ask?" Kat tipped her head towards the phone whilst Jay grabbed the suit jacket draped over the back of his office chair and wrestled his arms into the sleeves.

He smoothed down the collar, and then snatched up the binder from the top of the stack and followed her out into the corridor. "You know, when you marry someone, you expect to spend a lifetime together, not have them file for divorce a few years later and then end up dealing with a lifetime's worth of problems."

"Been there, my friend." Kat gave a kind of mouth-shrug, and then she cast him a sideways glance as they walked towards the conference room. "If you ever need to vent…"

"Thanks, but I think I'd rather just bury my head in the sand." He forced a smile at the colleagues they passed, one so frangible that a single tap would see it shatter.

"Well, the offer's always open."

Their pace slowed to a reluctant amble as they neared the end of the corridor, as though they were wading against the flow of a stream, the current growing stronger step by step.

Kat cast him another glance, and the lightness in her expression dimmed as she lowered her voice a fraction. "Any news about the secretary?"

Jay's brow pinched. "McCord?"

Her eyes widened, and she gave him a look as though to say—_Of course. Who else?_

"Nothing promising." They came to a stop outside the end office, and he motioned for her to step to the side. "Why?"

"Just wondering when she's going to be back." Kat peered around the corner and towards the conference room where the rest of the staff had already gathered. "One week of Cushing and I'm beginning to remember why I left DC and moved to an avocado farm."

"He's not that bad."

Kat arched her eyebrows at him.

Jay shrank back beneath the persistence of her look. "So, he's a little more _in-the-box_ than Secretary McCord, but that's not always a bad thing. At least he's getting things done."

She shook her head to herself and let out a huff. "Well, I didn't move back to DC for in-the-box and paper-pushing. It's diplomacy, not paint by numbers."

She strode towards the conference room, but Jay called her back. "Kat…" He waited for her to turn around and step closer again, her expression expectant. "When you moved to California, Desi's dad moved out there too, right?"

"Sure." Her eyebrows lifted, as though that was the last thing she'd been expecting him to ask. "He can work from pretty much anywhere, so long as it has an internet connection. Not that he was thrilled about the idea at first, but he soon came round."

"And if he had said no, that he wanted Desi to stay in DC, what would you have done?"

Kat pursed her lips and her gaze turned distant as it drifted away through the glass wall of the office behind. "I don't know." She spoke as though she'd never given it consideration before. "We've always been pretty good on communication, so I guess we would've figured something out, but I can't say that it was ever really an issue." Her gaze flitted back to him, as sharp as before, though her brow held a nick of concern. "Why'd you ask?"

He forced another smile. "Just wondering." Before she could say anything more, he gestured towards the conference room. "Shall we?"

Kat hesitated, and for a moment, with the way her gaze fixed on him and the way her eyes narrowed, it looked as though she were debating whether to press the matter further or whether to let it go. But then she shook off the expression and it was as though he had said nothing at all.

He followed her into the conference room. Though the lights overhead and the sconces on the walls glowed cool yellow, they did little to fend off the grey haze that spread through the curtains like a morning mist that refused to burn off and instead lingered long into the afternoon.

"My apologies, sir." Jay skirted around the head of the table and through the gap between the back of Secretary Cushing's chair and the cabinet where Blake stood and poured a stream of coffee into one of the porcelain cups. He placed the binder down on the desk, and then lowered himself into the seat next to Matt and eased himself closer to the edge of the wood. "I got caught up with something and lost track of time."

Secretary Cushing eyed him, unconvinced, unimpressed. "Right. Well, let's try to keep this brief. I've got an appointment across town at four." His gaze drifted along to Matt and then across the table to Kat. "So, where do we stand with this deal over the Bering Strait? Any progress?"

"Well, Russia are now answering our calls," Kat said, "so that's an improvement."

"Though they make a Siberian winter look like a week in the Bahamas." Matt leant across the desk and grabbed one of the croissants and a napkin from the middle.

"And for a non-native speaker, Minister Avdonin sure has a remarkable grasp on adjectives, particularly the more colourful ones." Blake placed a cup of coffee down in front of Secretary Cushing, and it rattled against the saucer.

Secretary Cushing acknowledged Blake with a half-nod, no smile, and then returned to Kat. A slight furrow settled across his brow. "But they're willing to resume negotiations?"

Kat's gaze darted to Jay, and then back to Secretary Cushing. "In theory."

Secretary Cushing's frown deepened as he looked from Kat to Jay and then back again. "In theory? Either they're willing to negotiate or not."

Jay rested his elbows atop the desk and leant into them, his hands folded loosely beneath his chin. "Russia are still looking to make amendments to the original terms of the deal."

"What kind of amendments?"

"They want to soften the environmental clauses that Secretary McCord pushed for."

Kat thumbed through the pages of her binder, and then spun it around and slid it across the desk towards Secretary Cushing. "So, we've been working on a list of possible inducements."

From his seat at the desk in the corner, Blake let out a huff. "As though keeping peace in the region, not to mention protecting the planet and preventing oceanic acidification, stratification and low oxygen zones aren't inducements enough."

Secretary Cushing's frown deepened further still, and he shot Blake a scowl over his shoulder.

Blake shrank away, pursed his lips, and found sudden interest in the keys of the laptop.

When Secretary Cushing returned to peering down at the page of proposed inducements, Kat continued, "Of course, once you agree, we'll need the White House to sign off on them, but we think that this could resolve the deadlock."

Secretary Cushing studied the page for a moment, and then looked up and stared at Kat. "But why are we considering offering them inducements at all?"

Kat's mouth opened, but then paused like that, and she glanced across to Jay.

Jay arched his hand atop his own binder. "Well, with more nations wanting access to shipping routes and resources, we need the deal to go ahead if we're to keep peace in the region."

Matt chipped in. "Otherwise it'll be like throwing a piece of candy into a crèche full of sugar-deprived three-year-olds."

Secretary Cushing shook his head and waved their comments aside. "You don't need to explain the importance of the deal to me. My question was why consider inducements when it's perfectly clear that the original terms are the problem."

A brief silence fell over the room, heightened by the patter of the rain against the windows.

Secretary Cushing continued, "I know that environmental issues were high on Secretary McCord's agenda, but if softening these clauses brings the Russians back to the negotiating table and enables us to close this deal, then I see no need for inducements."

Kat's eyes widened a fraction, and their whites gleamed with a hint of horror. "With all due respect, sir, if we agree to softening the terms, the Russians won't stop until we've removed the clauses altogether. Whereas inducements—"

"Are complex and costly."

A line of tension spread along Kat's jaw. "Surely complex and costly's better than the complex and costly effects it'll have on the environment if we were to gut this deal."

"Kat." Jay shot her a warning look.

The tension remained, but Kat added a curt—"Sir."

Secretary Cushing studied her for a moment, a slight flicker to his gaze, as though bouncing back and forth over whether or not it was worth his time to comment on her impertinence, especially when he had an appointment across town at four o'clock. But then his gaze stilled and he laid his hand atop the file. "The White House have made it clear that they want this deal to go through, and the way I see it, any deal is better than no deal, both for peace in the region and for the environment." He pushed himself up from his seat and then fastened the button of his suit jacket. "Reach out to the Russians, tell them that we're willing to soften the clauses, and let's see if we can get this thing signed off."

Jay rose to his feet too, his fingers spiked atop his binder. "Yes, sir."

Secretary Cushing took a sip of his coffee, clinked the cup back down against the saucer and then strode out of the room, each footstep a thump that shook through the walnut floorboards.

Kat stared after him, and as soon as he was halfway through the outer office, she snapped around to face Jay, her brow nicked with a frown. "You know that if we do this, the Russians won't stop until they've had us strip every last clause out of the deal."

Jay slumped back into his seat. He gave half-shrug. "What choice do we have?"

"Go to Russell Jackson, talk to him about offering the inducements."

Jay wrinkled his nose. "Behind the secretary's back?"

"Acting secretary," Matt cut in.

Jay shot Matt a look, and then returned to Kat. He shook his head. "No way."

"But if we do this—" Kat swept her hand towards the abandoned binder. "—we'll lose everything that Secretary McCord fought for."

Jay rested his elbows against the edge of the desk. Another shrug, more stilted this time. "And if we let the Russians walk away now, the environmental situation in the region will get even worse. The secretary isn't—"

"Acting secretary," Matt cut in again.

Jay shot him another look, one darker than before. "—wrong." He pivoted back to face Kat. "Any deal is better than no deal."

"But this is our opportunity." Kat's voice strained. Her gaze locked on him and her eyes widened in a way that begged him to open his own eyes and see. "If we let this go, we're basically defining the future of the region."

But Jay could already see—the bigger picture. "There'll be other deals."

Kat baulked. "Not in the BSR there won't."

"It's not our call. You heard the secretary."

"Acting secretary," Matt cut in.

Jay twisted around and glared at Matt. "The secretary who's currently in this building and who's in charge of foreign policy. And if he says we're going with the softened deal, then that's what we're going to do." He pushed himself up from his seat, and looked down at Kat. "Make the offer, see if that gets them to budge."

Before anyone could mount any further protests, Jay snatched up his binder and strode out of the conference room. He ducked into the hallway alongside the glass-walled offices and set a fast pace as he strode back towards his own office.

But the pounding of footsteps followed him. "Dude, wait a minute," Matt called after him.

Jay spun around, but he continued to pace backwards along the corridor.

"What's your problem?" Matt frowned at him. "Why won't you stand up for her?"

"Stand up for who?"

Matt glowered at him. "It's 'whom', and I'm talking about the secretary. You know this isn't the deal that she wants."

Jay held his hands out wide, the spine of the file resting in the curve of his fingers, its weight propped against his forearm. "I don't know if you've noticed, but she's not here, she hasn't been here in quite a while, and it doesn't really matter what she wants, not right now."

Matt stopped. His brow crumpled as though he were pained. "Who are you?"

Jay paused outside the door to his office. "Someone who knows his place. Someone who realises that sometimes you've just got to keep your head down and do the job that's asked of you."

"She is coming back."

"And if she doesn't? How far do you think circumventing the chain of command and defying direct orders will get you?" Jay shoved the door open, and it rattled against its frame. "Look, at the end of the day, our priority is keeping peace in the region. If that means bending a little in order to get the deal, then that's what we'll have to do."

Matt continued to stare at him, his lips pinched into a bud, as though he were watching a hero step back into the shadows.

But Jay left him there to think whatever he wanted, and he retreated inside. The door swung shut behind him and muffled the sounds of the office beyond. One thing lingered though: _Any deal is better than no deal at all._

He grabbed the phone from the cradle, wedged it between his ear and shoulder, and hit redial.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me again…" He massaged his brow, and his gaze fell to the photographs of Chloe that lined the cabinet behind his desk. "Look, I'm sorry about earlier. I'll do the mediation, if that's what you want. But you've got to be willing to give a little. She's my daughter too."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Reviews, thoughts, comments, typed out streams of consciousness... make me happy and keep me motivated, so please leave one before you go. : )**


	44. Chapter Forty-Two: secrets

**Note**: I agree about the pacing. It was one of the problems I identified in editing, but I didn't know how to fix it whilst keeping the story intact and without ruining the structure. I don't think releasing one chapter per day helps! Any thoughts, please send them my way (here or on Twitter). : )

* * *

**Chapter Forty-Two**

**…****secrets.**

**Stevie**

**5:33 PM**

The door to the ICU juddered shut behind Stevie, and as the locking mechanism clunked on, it felt as though she had stepped onto a prison wing, not a hospital ward. Though the air outside had been thick with rain, within those walls it felt twice as dense, dragged down by the weight of disinfectant and the odours it fought to suppress. Stevie slipped off her trench coat and folded it over one arm as she crept along the corridor. The_ tap-tap-tap_ of her heels chimed in time to the languid beeps that echoed out from the glass-walled cells.

Though many of the patients had pictures of loved ones pinned to the corkboard on the far wall and cards propped open on the desk at the front, the presence of such tokens only drew attention to the absence of the ones who had provided them and it brought the empty armchairs pushed to the sides of the room into even sharper focus, the same way that at home, the lilt of her mother's perfume and the clothes that still hung from the line in the basement created a gap. There, but not.

Stevie came to a halt outside Uncle Will's room. The bright blue disposable curtain that ran along the track inside the glass front had been drawn across, and the pit of her stomach clenched, as though after all the bad news she had received over the past few weeks, her default had been set to dread.

She turned to the nurses' station behind her, and then eased closer and rested her fingertips against the edge of the high-topped desk. "Excuse me?"

The nurse, an older woman with a bob of silver hair and with reading glasses on a chain of alternating pink and grey metallic beads, gave a heavy sigh and looked up from the chart she had been writing on behind the desk. Her expression was blank and her eyes were vague, as though being surrounded by the unconscious patients had numbed her to human contact, rendering Stevie no more than another page in a chart, another set of statistics.

"I'm here to visit Will Adams." Stevie tilted her head towards the room. "Is he…?"

"One of our nurses is in with him at the moment." The woman turned back to the chart and began writing again. "You'll have to come back in half an hour."

"Oh… Okay then."

"You can wait in the family room, or there's a coffee bar along the hall." With her gaze still fixed on the file, she wafted a hand along the corridor, gesturing back towards the main doors.

Stevie hoisted the straps of her bag up her shoulder. "Well, thanks…I guess."

* * *

The coffee bar turned out to be no more than a kiosk really, with a cluster of metal tables and chairs, but the aroma of coffee that it pumped out was welcome after a few lungfuls of the ward. Stevie took another swig of her latte through the hole in the plastic lid, and then set the cup down again whilst she continued to scroll down the screen of her phone where it lay flat against the tabletop. Every last conversation seemed to be chatter about what to buy for Tash's baby shower, or how impossible it was for a young professional to get on the housing ladder these days, or coordinating outfits for the various weddings that loomed ahead.

Her mother had once said that keeping secrets was the hardest part of her job; not because of the fear that she might slip up and what cost that would incur, but because of the distance it forced, separating those who knew from those who did not. Now, not only unable to share in those conversations with her friends because she was single and still lived at home and some days it felt as though her eggs would be well past their prime before she ever settled down, but also unable to share anything with her friends regarding what was going on in her own life, Stevie understood what her mother had meant. She felt as though over the past few weeks her own glass walls had risen up, leaving her surrounded by people, still visible, yet utterly detached.

"Is this seat taken?" A man in navy blue scrubs laid his hand on the back of the chair opposite.

"No, go ahead." Stevie gave him only a flicker of a glance and then returned to her phone. But something jolted in her mind, and she looked up again, properly this time. A smile spread across her face. "Dr Owens… Hey."

"Hi." Dr Owens's cheeks dimpled as he smiled back. "And please, Jon is fine."

Stevie nodded. "Jon."

"So can I…?" He motioned to the seat.

"Sure." She clicked the screen to black and then pushed the phone to one side.

He placed his own cup of takeaway coffee down, along with a bag of mini pretzels, and settled into the seat. The feet of the chair screeched against the floor as he edged it closer to the table. "I wanted to say thanks for your help last week. It looks like your contact paid off."

"Oh, that?" She wrinkled her nose. "That was nothing. I'm pretty sure State did all the work."

"Well, someone had to put me on their radar." After a second or two, his smile dimmed and a slight pinch gripped his brow. "I didn't get you into trouble with your boss, did I?"

"Russell? No. I mean, he wasn't exactly thrilled at the thought of me giving his number out to strangers, but given the circumstances and so long as I don't make a habit of it, I think we're cool."

"Good." The smile returned. He pulled open the packet of pretzels, and then set the bag in the middle of the table. With a gesture, he showed her that she was welcome to help herself.

"Thanks." She popped one of the pretzels into her mouth and savoured it as the salt tingled over her tongue, and then she washed it down with another swig of coffee. With the cup rested against the table, she cradled her hands around it and soaked up its warmth. "So, how is my uncle doing? I just dropped by to see him, but the nurses told me to come back later. Hence the sitting around here."

Jon chewed over his own pretzel, nodding whilst he waited to swallow the bite. "He's doing well. Unfortunately, it's never quite as dramatic as the movies, where people wake up instantly and everything's fine, but he's making small improvements each day."

"But he should make a full recovery, right?"

"This case is pretty unique, but I'm optimistic that he will."

The tightness in her chest lifted, but only momentarily. Waking up was only ever the first step; another thing her mother had taught her. "Russell's appointed me the task of getting him to speak in coherent sentences, though to be honest, I don't have a clue how I'm meant to do that. I kinda think he might be sending me on a snipe hunt just to keep me occupied."

"I thought that, working for the White House, you'd have plenty of things to keep you busy."

"True." Stevie stared down at the plastic lid whilst her fingers drummed against the edge of the cup. Her gaze flicked up to Jon, and her lips tugged to one side. "I guess at the moment there's this problem that I have, only it's not mine to fix, but doing nothing makes me feel…I don't know…" Her gaze drifted away again and settled on the people who wandered past: nurses in stiff-hemmed smocks that lurched with each step; an elderly patient being pushed along in a wheelchair whilst the porters bantered and laughed above his head; a girl with blonde plaits, hand-in-hand with her mother as she skipped along at her mother's side. "…kinda helpless."

She returned to Jon. Her gaze dipped as shook her head, whilst the heat of a faint blush rose through her cheeks. "Sorry. That probably didn't make a lot of sense. I guess I'm just feeling stuck, and my uncle getting better is a step towards things returning to normal, and I don't know if there really is anything I can do to help, but I just want to feel productive, you know?"

"I do." The corners of Jon's eyes softened in a way that made her feel as though maybe she weren't just blathering at a semi-stranger, and that maybe he did understand. "And there are some things you can do to help, not instant cures, but they'll speed up his recovery."

"Really?"

"Spending time with him, talking to him, playing him music that he likes."

"And that'll help?"

Jon nodded. "Anything that stimulates the brain."

"Cool. Well, I guess I can do that."

He cast a glance around them, and then leant forward in his seat, his shoulders hunching, and he lowered his voice a fraction. "And I probably shouldn't say this, but minimally conscious patients make great listeners if you have anything that you need to get off your chest."

Stevie gave a huff of a laugh, and tipped her finger towards him. "I'll bear that in mind."

Her smile lingered for a moment or two. Then its lightness drained away until eventually it collapsed. Her fingertips fumbled over the edge of the cardboard sleeve that wrapped around her coffee cup, and when she looked up at Jon again, she bunched her lips to the side. "I feel kinda bad for not visiting him more. You see all the patients just lying there alone…"

Jon wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "Don't. It's not the most pleasant place to be; I don't like it, and I'm paid to work here. Besides, he's had more visitors than most."

Stevie's brow furrowed.

At her questioning look, he continued, "Obviously your mother stayed with him here for quite a while, and your father's been back a few times too. And I had the pleasure of meeting your aunt and cousin earlier." A soft smile crept to his lips and dimpled his cheeks again. "Your cousin gave me all of her blue M&Ms."

Something tugged at the back of Stevie's mind, and she laughed. "That's because her dad probably told her that they're made from crushed up Smurfs."

His smile dropped. "Oh."

She grinned, whilst the memory flooded back like a rolling tide of summer-sunned waters, warm through her chest. "Uncle Will used to tell us the same thing when we were little. That, and that rice cakes are really made from cardboard."

He quirked an eyebrow. "Aren't they?"

She gave a half-chuckle, and then rested her elbows atop the table, her hands folded beneath her chin. "God… It used to drive my mom nuts." Her gaze sharpened on him. "My sister, Alison, was a fussy eater, and Mom used to complain that every time Uncle Will came over there'd be another food added to the list of things that she refused to touch. Spaghetti were worms, curly fries were pigs' tails, and fish fingers were, well, fingers from fish."

The warm waters bathed her for a second, maybe more, but they quickly turned cold and surrendered to an ache that rippled through her chest, as though when those memories were formed, they had strummed out a minor chord thrum that could reach through time and touch her even now.

She took a swig of coffee, all bitterness at the back of her tongue. She grimaced. "And then we grew up. And _stuff_ happened."

Jon watched her for a moment, and his own expression dimmed. "How is your mother?"

Stevie leant back from the table, and her hands retreated to her lap. She gave a nod, perhaps a touch too brisk. "She's fine."

"Still building up her strength?"

"Well…" Her smile strained. "She's been through a lot."

"You all have."

"She had it worse." Her lips pursed, and she held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she turned away. She clicked the screen of her phone on and then off again. "Well, I should probably be getting back. It was good to see you again, and thanks for the tips with my uncle."

"I'll come with you." He braced himself against the arms of his chair, and eased up from his seat. He scrunched up the empty pretzel packet and tossed it into the trashcan next to the kiosk. "I can let you back onto the ward."

"Oh, no, it's okay, really." She stooped down and picked up her handbag from where it slouched against the foot of her chair and then slung her trench coat over her arm.

"I'm heading that way anyway."

She paused, whilst he continued to watch her—expectant.

"Save you waiting for the nurses to answer the door."

And she didn't really want to deal with the woman who had been sat behind the desk again, or waste another half an hour loitering outside while people ignored the buzzer. So she gave a nod. "Okay, sure."

They walked in silence along the corridor. The door to the ICU loomed ahead. Beyond the panes of grid-lined glass, the lights seemed dim compared to the glare outside, and as they neared, the tightness in Stevie's chest grew as though her lungs could already taste the claustrophobic air that awaited them. It was no wonder Annie had given Jon all of her blue M&Ms if she thought that he was the one holding her father in a place like this.

Jon cast her a sideways glance, and then another, alternating them with his steps. "Look, I'm sorry if I struck a nerve asking about your mother. I didn't mean to pry."

"No, it's fine." Stevie hoisted the straps of her bag further up her shoulder, and clung to them, her fingertips curling into the faux leather. "You were her doctor, it's only natural to ask."

"Maybe next time you're here, I can buy you a coffee to make up for it."

"Nothing to make up for."

"Then just a coffee?" He came to a stop outside the ward. "And I promise not to ask about anything you'd rather not talk about."

He gave her a hopeful smile, his dimples poised to blossom.

Her own smile threatened to break through, but she fought against it as she rubbed her brow and then let her hand fall back to her side. "It's not that I don't want to talk about it, it's just there a lot of things that I can't talk about."

"Well, I already know the reason why your mother and uncle were hospitalised, so if you ever want to talk about that, it's not like you'd be giving away any secrets."

She paused. "That's true…"

"Or we can stick strictly to favourite movies and songs and other standard small talk. Though I have to warn you, I probably only manage to get to the movie theatre once a year, and when it comes to music, unless it's being played on the radio in the doctors' lounge, I probably haven't heard of it."

Stevie's lips tugged to one side, whilst her gaze dipped to avoid the soft persistence of his look. Perhaps it would be good to have someone to talk to, someone she didn't have to hide the poisoning from. Plus, it didn't hurt that he was a _doctor_. A doctor who had saved both her mother and her uncle. That had to be better than a spy, or whatever Alexander—Dmitri—was. And he hadn't automatically assumed that he could use her for her connections, unlike pretty much everyone else in DC. But even so, she'd have to hide what had happened to her mother next and where she was now, even if she felt like he already had an inkling that something was up.

"I don't know." Her grip on her bag tightened, as though that alone could hold her back from saying yes, and she shifted her weight from foot to foot whilst a smile strained to burst onto her lips. "You seem like a nice guy, it's just there's a lot going on at the moment…"

He slipped the sleeve off his coffee cup, and then snatched the biro that peeked from the chest pocket of his scrub top, and leaning against the wall, he scribbled down a phone number.

"Here." He handed her the piece of cardboard. "Just think about it. And if not, then at least you have another contact, in case you need anything while you're visiting your uncle."

She fingered rough edge of the sleeve for a moment. No harm in thinking about it, taking his number wasn't committing to anything, and it might come in useful. She dropped the jotted-down number into her handbag, and as she did, it felt as though she were reaching through the glass that surrounded her, a brush of contact.

He pressed the ID pass that hung from his lanyard against the sensor on the wall, and the locking system clunked off. He hauled open the door and held it there for her, the toes of one trainer wedged against the bottom. "Another thing you could try with your uncle is telling him old memories. There's some research to suggest that might help."

"Thanks. I'll try that." She stepped through, and as the stale air hit her, she turned back to face him. "Well, I guess I'll see you around."

He nodded. Another flash of a smile. "Either way. Take care."

* * *

The glass door of Uncle Will's room juddered shut behind Stevie. A prickle ran up into the nape of her neck, and she glanced back towards the nurses' station. She paused for a moment, though what she was waiting for she wasn't sure, and then she crept further inside and dumped her bag against the wall. The silence in the room buzzed like static over her skin, and it made every interruption of sound twice as loud, so much so that when she the dragged the armchair closer to the bed and its feet screeched across the vinyl floor, she flinched—a jolt of shock.

She folded her trench coat over the back of the chair, and settled onto the cushion. A pause. Then she took hold of Uncle Will's hand where it rested amidst the tangled vines of wires and plastic tubes atop the bed. Wasn't that what she was supposed to do in a situation like this?

She glanced behind her again, and then cleared her throat. "Hey, Uncle Will… So, this is weird. I'm not really sure what I'm meant to talk about, or if you can even hear me right now; it's probably better if you can't, because I'm pretty sure I'm making a massive fool of myself."

She stared down at his hand. Parchment-thin skin stretched to the point of translucence over his bones and tendons; for a moment, she feared it might split. She took a deep breath, but it stuck high in her chest. "Your doctor said that I should try telling you about old memories, he said that might help. But to be honest, I can't think of any right now. Instead, all I can think of is how mad I am at you."

She studied his face: the hollows beneath his cheekbones, the greyish pallor, the rusted red blotches where someone had nicked his skin with the razor whilst shaving his beard for him. "I'm mad at you for not waking up sooner, I'm mad at you for ever being in a coma, I'm mad at you for getting poisoned in the first place. Which I realise is totally stupid, because none of that's your fault. But still, I'm mad at you. Because if you had just woken up, if none of this had ever happened, then Mom wouldn't be struggling right now, and then I wouldn't be struggling with trying to find ways to fix her, which I know is utterly pointless, because as Russell keeps telling me, she needs to fix herself, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to try."

She ran her thumb back and forth across his knuckles, barely grazing the skin, and she looked up at him again. "Dad's struggling too. He doesn't like to talk about it, but you can see how much he misses her, and he's trying to put on a brave face and be all Captain Stoical, but it's not working. He even yelled at Aunt Maureen the other day. Gave this whole speech on what Mom means to him and how horrible Aunt Maureen has always been to her. It would have been pretty epic, if only it weren't so depressing." Her thumb stilled. "I'm glad that he stood up for her though. I just wish he'd done it sooner, and that she'd been there to see it. I think she would've loved it, even though she would've done her best to hide it."

She paused, her mouth open. Something in her chest deflated, like a billowing sail suddenly robbed of the wind. "You know, parents are meant to be invincible, they're meant to have all the answers, and I know that they're only human and I'm way too old to still believe that, but I do."

She shook her head. "I did."

She swallowed back the thickness in her throat, but her voice strained and then cracked. "I just want my mom back. I want her to be happy again. I want _her_ to be the one who's mad at you. Because she always was. But she also loves you. And I know that you love her too, even if you're always doing your utmost to irritate her or goad her into a fight." She tugged at his fingers, only lightly though. "I remember when you used to babysit us when you came to stay, and the first thing you'd do was take us to the store and buy us all the things that we wanted but that Mom said we weren't meant to have, and we'd get so hyped up and sick on sugar, and Mom would go ballistic when she got home, and each time she swore she'd never let you look after us again, though of course that never lasted long; or that time I practically begged you to let me get my ears pierced because all my friends had theirs done, and you took me to the mall, despite the fact you knew that Mom had said I had to wait until I was sixteen, and you told me just to make sure that I hid my ears with my hair while I was at home, but of course Mom spotted them in fifteen seconds flat, and then Dad had to take us out to sit in the car, because Mom wouldn't stop yelling at you, and turns out she knows some pretty imaginative swear words; or that time when you taught Jason the lyrics to those less than savoury marching songs, and Mom didn't find out until after he'd shared them with his friends and they'd spread all across the playground, and then Mom had to spend an hour lying her ass off to the principal about how Jason definitely couldn't be the source and how he'd never been exposed to such language at home."

Her grip on his hand tightened. "You've always pushed her, and she's always accepted it. But this…this has gone too far. And I know that you getting better now won't take away what's happened, it won't cure her, but maybe you can talk some sense into her, maybe you can make her want to fight, to want to get better, because I'm scared that she's going to give up. And if she does that…" Her gaze sailed away from him and she shook her head, whilst the pressure at the top of her chest grew and grew until it felt as though everything might simultaneously explode and collapse. Her breath escaped in a rush. "I don't know what we're supposed to do."

She bowed her head.

But then Uncle Will pulled back beneath her touch, and she jumped.

His eyelids fluttered half-open, and his gaze spun around the room in a drunken reel before it landed on her. It sharpened, a moment of recognition. "'lizabeth."

She rose from the armchair, and perched on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the lines and wires. "Uncle Will…? It's Stevie."

"Where's 'lizabeth?" His voice sounded as brittle as dried earth. "…need 'lizabeth."

"She's not here. Do you want me to—" She eased away from the bed.

But he grabbed hold of her hand, his grip so tight that her skin pitted and blanched. "She's going to run. 'lizabeth's going to run."

She stopped. She frowned at him. "What?"

"She's going to run." He tried to push himself up from his reclined position on the bed, but he collapsed backwards. "You need to stop her."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't let her run." He tried to push himself up again. "Tell her. She needs to stop."

"Okay. I'll tell her." She rubbed his hand, trying to calm him. "I'll tell her. I promise."

He nodded, and then slumped back, and his eyelids fluttered shut again.

Whilst he settled back into his slumber, Stevie's heart continued to pound against the walls of her chest, so hard that it felt as though the glass around her might shatter. Run? Run from what? Or maybe not 'from', but 'for'. _The presidency_. Russell was _invested _in her, he and Dalton wanted her to run. That's what her father had said. And there had always been rumours in the press, though her mother had always denied having any interest, had insisted that mingling with potential campaign donors was for the benefit of whoever the administration eventually picked, had sworn blind that the holiday party was just for whipping votes, had repeated over and over and over again that she had no intention of running, none at all. But had she actually been considering it? Had she already decided? Could that be what started this? A single decision. Run, or not.

Another secret. Another glass wall. It rose up between Stevie and her mother; it forced an extra layer of separation and it left Stevie feeling even more detached than just moments before.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	45. Chapter Forty-Three: fly or fall

**Note:** Thank you for all your thoughts on the last chapter. They are much appreciated! : )

* * *

**Chapter Forty-Three**

**…****fly or fall.**

**Elizabeth**

**10:59 PM**

Elizabeth took one last glance around the bedroom and then flipped the light switch off. The room tumbled into darkness, yet the glass vase that held the flowers Conrad had brought her and the orange sheen of the biscuit box that she had left beside the vase on top of the dresser just inside the door still caught a glimmer of the dim light that crept in from the hall. One step at a time. Perhaps it wasn't the path that Conrad had intended her to go down, but it was the path she needed to take. Away from there. Back to Will. Away from everything that had happened.

She grasped the handles of her bag, carried it out into the corridor, and then guided the door into its frame with a soft click so as not to disturb the patients fast asleep in the adjacent bedrooms. Beneath the feeble glow that diffused from either end of the hall, the pink of the linoleum flooring was even duller than usual, and without the laces in her sneakers, her feet slipped forward with each step that she took along that tract. Her toes instinctively curled into the ends of her shoes, lending a certain precariousness to the walk. It almost felt as though her shoes were trying to trip her up. Like they wanted to see her fall.

But she made it past the row of windows—all rain-fogged, all with the darkness outside pressing through—and then down the stairs and along to reception, where the stale fug of the steel column radiators and the full glare of the fluorescent strip lights overhead greeted her. That, and Dr Sherman.

Dr Sherman had been chatting to Matt where he stood next to the inner set of glass doors, but she stopped as Elizabeth shouldered open the door that led from the corridor and stepped through. She pushed herself up from her seat on the couch, its velvet finishing a shade of dusty rose, and she ambled over, her lips fixed in a strained smile. "Elizabeth."

"I thought you would've gone home by now." Elizabeth dumped her bag on one of the chairs.

"I wanted to speak to you before you left."

"You mean you thought you'd have another go at convincing me to stay." Her hands found her hips beneath the open folds of her black woollen overcoat.

"It's not too late to change your mind."

"What happened to not stopping me if I decided to leave?"

Dr Sherman held Elizabeth's gaze for a moment, and then she perched against the arm of one of the chairs, her hands clasped in front of her. She eased herself into a tentative smile. "I had a chat with Henry earlier."

Elizabeth's stomach tightened, but she buried the feeling with a shrug. "And?"

"He said he'd like for you to stay here."

"Right…" Her stomach dropped. She massaged her brow, and then as her hand fell back to her hip, she forced a smile that could be no more than grim at best. "Well, nothing says I love you quite like 'I'd rather you'd stay at a nuthouse.'."

"He's concerned about you."

"Why? What did you tell him?"

Dr Sherman's shoulders raised towards the sway of her hoop earrings. "Simply that you're worried about your brother and that you'd rather be there for him than continue with therapy."

"Well, when you put it like that of course he's going to be concerned." Elizabeth huffed. She shook her head to herself and turned her gaze to the floor.

_Concerned_. Just like how _concerned _he'd been at the thought of her going to Baghdad. And if this _concern_ came with a similar ultimatum—a threat that things between them might come to an end—she couldn't say that he'd win this time, because wherever love came from—mind, heart or soul—it had been swallowed by the hollow that unfurled inside her, like a black hole at her core that was deepening by the second, feeding on her need to cope, on her efforts to cope. But the fact remained: she had coped, she could cope, she would cope. And if she could cope with everything else, then maybe, eventually, she'd find her way through this darkness too.

And if she didn't? If the vast swathes of emptiness were all that she could expect from now on?

She tried to muster a single spark of her own concern, something that might ignite and take over and illuminate his point of view, but like the rain that pounded the windows and roof, her inability to remember what she had felt like before doused any flicker before it stood a chance of taking hold.

She held up one hand in a star, the other still clutching her hip. "Look, I really don't care what he said, not right now. So, can we just get the paperwork done so that I can go?"

Dr Sherman turned her head from side to side, like a sigh without a sound. "If you're sure that's what you want—"

"I am." Elizabeth snatched up her bag from the chair, and then she turned to Matt who still stood by the glass entrance doors and stared distantly across the reception as though he hadn't heard a single word. "Matt, please will you bring the car round. This won't take long."

"Actually, ma'am…" Matt's gaze flitted from Elizabeth to Dr Sherman and back again.

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed, whilst realisation dawned. "He didn't."

"Russell Jackson said that we're not to drive you away from the premises."

"And do you work for Russell Jackson?"

"No, ma'am. But he said he was speaking on behalf of the president."

"I bet he did," she muttered. She took a deep breath, and then huffed it out. She steeled her gaze on Matt. "Well, in that case, you're going to face a bit of a dilemma, because I'm leaving whether Russell Jackson likes it or not, so either you can defy proxy-POTUS and drive me yourself, or I can get a cab, in which case it's going to be awfully hard for you to fulfil the duties of your job."

Matt pulled a face. "Ma'am, with all due respect, you're not going to get a cab."

"Aren't I?" She clutched the straps of her bag in both hands, and paced backwards down the corridor towards the office. With each step that she took, Matt's expression turned more and more grave. "So, are you going to bring the car around or not?"

Matt paused for a second longer, and then reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his cell phone. A frown spread across his brow as he stared down at the screen. He looked up at Dr Sherman. "Can I use the landline?"

Amy and another member of staff, a young auburn-haired woman called Madeleine, were in the kitchenette opposite the office. Elizabeth leant against the door frame, her bag still swaying from her hands. "Amy, Matt here would like to use the phone, and I'd like to sign the paperwork so that I can leave. Whenever you're ready."

"Sure," Amy said through the bite of blueberry muffin she'd just popped into her mouth. She dusted off her fingertips over the plate, leaving a scattering of crumbs and golden sugar granules, and then braced herself against the table and pushed herself to standing. "Just a sec."

She held a loose fist to her mouth as she hurried to chew over the mouthful and swallow it down, and then she dumped the plate in the sink, dodging out of Madeleine's way as Madeleine carried two slices of milk-white bread over and slotted them into the toaster. A knife and plate and a jar of semi-crystallised honey waited on the stretch of countertop in front.

When Amy caught Elizabeth's look, a blush rose through her cheeks, and though faint, it was highlighted by the fuchsia frames of her glasses. "You know what they say about night shifts and carbs." Then she paused, and looked between Elizabeth and Matt. "Do you want anything?"

"Just the forms," Elizabeth said, "and the phone."

Amy slipped out the doorway, between Elizabeth and Matt, and scurried towards the office on the opposite side of the hall. She punched in the number code on the door, and then leant inside and flicked on the light switch. She stood aside, her back pressed to the door as she held it open.

Elizabeth placed her bag down by the foot of one of the chairs, whilst Matt dragged the white office phone across the desk. He wedged the handset between his ear and shoulder, and he punched in the number that he read from the screen of his cell phone. A pause.

Elizabeth settled down into the chair, and crossed one leg over the other. She twisted around to face Amy as the door thudded shut behind her. "I'll need my possessions back too."

Matt shot her a look, as though he thought that request was more than a little premature, and then his face sobered in a flash and he straightened up. "Mr Jackson, sir, this is Secretary McCord's security detail—"

"…"

"Yes, sir."

"…"

"I know, sir."

"…"

"Just a moment, sir." He held the phone out to Elizabeth. "He wants to speak to you, ma'am."

Elizabeth eyed the phone for a long second before she accepted it. She leant back in the seat, one hand rested against the arm of the chair, and she lifted the handset to her ear. "Russell."

"Elizabeth, it's late. Just go to bed and stop making a scene."

"I know it's late, and I'll go to bed when I get home."

"You're not going home."

"You can't have DS detain me here."

"I think you'll find I can."

She hunched forward in the chair, and her grip on the phone tightened whilst she lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. "Russell, I swear to God, if you don't tell DS to drive me wherever the hell I want to go right now, I'll call a cab. And when the driver sells the story to the press of how he picked up the secretary of state from a mental health clinic in the middle of the night, all while the administration has been keeping everything under wraps, you're the one who's going to have to deal with it."

Russell's voice strained. "If you do that, you'll end your career."

"It was made pretty clear to me earlier that I no longer have a career."

"You can get your job back if you just do the goddamn work."

Elizabeth shook her head, and her hair swayed against her cheek. "I'm not staying here, Russell. So, it's up to you. Either tell DS to take me home, or I'm hanging up and calling a cab, and when the tabloids get a hold of the story, we both know how good that'll look for POTUS."

A pause. "Okay, now you're just being irrational."

"Probably best not to call my bluff then."

"Just stay there tonight, and we'll talk in the morning."

"Five seconds, Russell, and then I'm hanging up." She waited.

Nothing.

Both Matt's and Amy's gazes prickled over her.

God, it was like dealing with a child. "Five…four…three…two…one—"

"Fine." Russell snapped. "Pass me back to DS. But I'm telling you: you are not fine, you are not coping, and you can't just run away from this."

"Good talking to you, Russell." She held the phone up to Matt.

Matt stared at the handset for a moment before he raised it tentatively to his ear. "Sir?"

Elizabeth looked to Amy, who had scooted around to the opposite side of the desk and stood behind the office chair, her fingers folded over the back. "I'll be needing that paperwork now."

The blush returned to Amy's cheeks, and averting her gaze, she darted around the chair and sank down onto its seat. The chair clunked as it lowered beneath her weight. She joggled the computer mouse and then tapped away at the keyboard, and moments later the printer that rested atop the filing cabinet in the corner behind her sputtered into life.

Matt clattered the phone back into its cradle, and then looked to Elizabeth, his expression a touch more than wary. "Ma'am, when you're done, I'll bring the car round."

"Thanks, Matt." She offered him a smile, empty and unreciprocated. "I won't be long."

The door behind her juddered into its frame, whilst Amy reached up and grabbed the sheets of paper from the output tray of the printer. She clacked one onto a clipboard; the other she signed using a biro she plucked from the marble print pen pot at the front of the desk. She folded the signed page into rough thirds and stuffed it into a brown DL envelope.

"Here's your discharge letter." She presented Elizabeth with the envelope. "And then I just need you to sign this form to say that you're leaving against your therapist's advice." She pushed the clipboard across the desk, the pen lying on top.

Elizabeth slipped the envelope into the side pocket of the bag, and then snatched up the pen and clipboard. She swooped her signature across the bottom of the page without reading so much as one word of the form, and then shoved the clipboard back across the desk. "Is that it?"

Not that she wanted the process to be convoluted, but it felt simple. Too simple. After all the fuss people had made about her not being able to go home, turned out all she needed to do was to sign a form and she could walk straight out the front door.

"That's it. I'll just get your things for you." Amy balanced the clipboard on top of the filing cabinet, a precipice next to the printer, and then she wheeled herself over to the safe in the opposite corner. "But you know that of course you can come back here at any point. All our contact details are in the discharge letter, should you need us."

"Thanks, but that won't be necessary."

The safe let out a bleep and the locking system clunked off.

Amy rooted around inside, and then a moment later she walked her chair back to the desk, Elizabeth's coat belt, laces and a ziplock bag containing her rings clutched in her hands. "Well, we hope that our clients don't feel the need to return to us, but we know that these things are never simple. And most clients spend more than ten days with us."

But most clients probably didn't have a brother who'd just awoken from a coma.

Elizabeth motioned to the safe. "I had a watch too."

"Of course." Amy's cheeks pinkened again, and she scurried back over to the safe.

Elizabeth stuffed the belt and laces into the side pocket of her bag, next to the envelope—she could sort them out in the car—and then she emptied the rings from the ziplock bag into her palm. She twisted them over her finger joints, and winced slightly as they squeezed on the bone. When she had taken them off, it had felt as though she was giving up pieces of herself, but now, as their gold gleamed beneath the glare of the lights that lined the ceiling, they lacked the warmth they had held when Henry had first slipped them into place, and they left her feeling cold and less than whole. Maybe she should have put them in the side pocket too.

"Here you go." Amy handed her the watch.

"Thanks."

"Do you want me to call your husband and let him know you're on your way?"

"No." Elizabeth eased the watch strap through the buckle. "It's late. I'll probably just crash on the couch when I get back." Each notch that the buckle passed echoed with the tightness that grew in her chest. "Or I might go visit my brother at the hospital. I don't want him to be alone."

"Well, make sure you get enough rest." Amy rose from her seat and padded across the cord carpet towards the door. "Holidays can be stressful enough even when you have slept."

"I will." Elizabeth braced her hands against her knees, her palms clammy against the rasp of the denim. She took a breath; it filled no more than the top quarter of her lungs, yet it pressed down like an iron weight. "A colleague of mine brought me some flowers, they're still in my room, but I thought maybe you could use them at reception." She pushed herself up to standing, and then stooped down and lifted her bag onto the seat. "I don't want them going to waste."

"Sure, we can do that." Amy twisted the lock free, and propped open the door. "I'll open the main door for you, and then you're free to go."

Elizabeth forced a smile. "Thanks."

She clasped the leather straps, hauled the bag off the seat, and then stepped out into the shadows of the hall. The smell of burnt toast wafted out from the kitchenette opposite, a subtle sting beneath the air, and it tingled in her nose. She held her breath, suffocated the feeling that stirred the pit of her stomach, yet still the scent crept through.

_Focus, just focus_. She marched towards the yellow-white glow of reception that ached along the corridor as fast as her lace-loosed sneakers would allow, Amy a step behind, or so said the squeak of a second pair of shoes against the linoleum floor.

Rain pounded the roof and windows, a thrum that hummed through her and melded with the beat of her heart. Her grip on the straps of the bag tightened, and she ran her thumb along the rough ridge where the edges of the leather met.

The glass doors loomed ahead. Almost there. Just a few steps more.

Amy punched the code into the keypad on the wall. Elizabeth focused on that, used it as her anchor: the digits, C4891X; the soft click as each button compressed; the bleep that came with the correct sequence; the whoosh as the door slid open. And then she counted off numbers too: ninety-seven, eighty-nine, eighty-three, seventy-nine, seventy-three, seventy-one…

Until the jitter inside shrank back into its hollow. See—she could cope.

"Elizabeth?" Dr Sherman's voice came from behind her.

Elizabeth spun around to find Dr Sherman stood next to the row of chairs, her expression expectant, as though maybe she had said her name more than once. "Sorry. World of my own."

"I know we've already discussed this, but any issues, please call."

"Sure." She turned back to Amy, and as the last of the feeling that had gripped her ebbed away, she flashed her a perfunctory smile. "Well, it was nice to meet you."

"You too." Amy smiled back, and she held her hand out towards the open door.

Elizabeth strode out into the space between the two sets of doors. The darkness outside leached in, whilst the lights inside flooded out. They melded together to form a haze of neither this nor that, a haze that—caught between the mirrors that lined either wall—stretched on for forever into the distance. Or almost forever. At some point it must have come to an end.

In the car park, headlights flared on and illuminated the shards of rain, and one of the black SUVs rolled up to the edge where the gravel met the concrete. Behind it, the branches of the black walnut tree swayed, the last of its leaves lost to the feathered shroud that coated the grassy island below.

The brakes creaked and the car gave a slight lurch as it came to a halt. Its wipers continued to thrash back and forth with a pulsing _thunk-thunk-thunk_, and they sent up a spray that arced into the night and sailed to the ground.

Matt climbed out, his shoulders hunched, his face a grimace as the rain poured down.

Elizabeth paced towards the door opposite; her reflection rippled in the glass before the door swooshed open and swept it away. A blast of cold air gusted in, thick with the scent of rainfall and the tug of exhaust fumes.

She stepped up to the threshold, to the brink between the haze and the night.

Matt wrenched open the backdoor.

And she…

Stopped.

Night turned to murky grey as a woman in navy blue scrubs splashed across the waterlogged ground and climbed up into the footwell, whilst on the backseat, Will's body continued to jerk and thrash. "How long's he been seizing?" the woman shouted.

"I don't know." Elizabeth's mind fogged. She scrabbled to think, but everything hazed beneath the throb of her pulse. _He was going to die. This was it. He was going to die_. She raked her fingers through her rain-bedraggled locks. "Ten minutes? Maybe more. It feels like more."

Three men in the same navy scrubs ran towards the vehicle—a trolley trundled between them, and the wheels threw off arcs of puddle water—just as another two black SUVs screeched to a halt in the ambulance bay and their lights and sirens cut out.

"And has he stopped at all, or has this been constant?"

"Constant," Elizabeth said, as the DS agents fled their vehicles and swarmed in around her. She shook her elbow free from Matt's grasp and stumbled towards the car, but the muscles in her legs tightened and threatened to give out.

"Ma'am…? Ma'am…?" Matt shouted. "What's happening?"

"Give her some space. Elizabeth?"

Dr Sherman's voice hurled her into a whiplash. Day strobed into night, black strobed into white, and everything spun into vortex, and though she reached for something, anything, there was nothing there—no numbers, no memories, no anchors—nothing she could use to haul herself out.

She saw Will rapt in convulsions on the backseat. She heard windscreen wipers screech and thunk. She felt Will's pulse thrum beneath her touch. She tasted grilled salmon flake on her tongue. She smelt raindrops and gasoline lift from the sodden concrete. She saw a spray of poppy seeds skitter across her plate. She heard the wail of sirens and the blast of the horn. She saw Will's eyes dull with an endless haze. She felt heat roll through her veins as her body burnt up. She tasted béchamel-slick pappardelle slide down her throat. She smelt burnt toast acrid in her nose. She saw Will's mouth bubble with pink saliva foam. She heard the roar of gravel as a car crawled along the track. She felt Will's chest still and his breathing stop. She tasted the sting of disinfectant sear through her lungs. She smelt the miasma that infiltrated the air of the ward. She saw the branches of a black walnut tree spider across the night. She heard the shouts of a doctor demand them to push another ten. She saw tail lights trapped in raindrops like the embers of fireflies. She felt the tubes, lines and fluids that fed her veins. She heard the rustle of the breeze as it swept through the long grass. She felt the drag of the endotracheal tube slither up her throat. She saw Will turn ashen and his lips turn blue. She heard the trundle of the trolley race inside. She felt the violation of the catheter and the concomitant shame. She saw plastic wrappings drop to the trauma bay floor. She felt the stab of fluorescent lights shoot through her eyes. She saw the oxygen mask on Will's face dislodge and slip down. She heard the _blip, blip, blip_ of the heart rate monitor before she awoke. She felt the fug of a hundred diners press in all around. She heard Will gasp and gurgle over every breath. She felt the dry blades of the paddock scratch at her bare soles. She saw raindrops bleed across bulletproof glass. She smelt the trace of sandalwood laced into the blazer's wool. She felt every twitch and flinch and jerk. She saw outstretched fingers scrabble for her own. _Take my hand._

She saw a woman crumpled on the foyer floor, her reflection multiplied a thousandfold. She saw DS agents stare at her in horror, whilst clinic staff flocked around. She heard the staff call her name and coach her through, breath by breath. She heard the echo of the panic alarm blare in the background. She felt her chest constrict and suck emptiness into her lungs. She felt her heart thunder and pang and fibrillate until she knew that it would stop. She felt the tingle in her fingers fade and turn numb. She saw herself for what she was, what others could see and what she had not.

The air rippled and then stilled, and she felt the seamless edge of the cusp.

Fly or fall?

"Take my hand."

Fly or fall?

_What on earth have I become?_

* * *

**So, that brings us to the end of the third part. Thank you for reading and reviewing so far!**

**See you tomorrow for the start of part four?**


	46. Chapter Forty-Four: one step

**Note:** Thank you for all your reviews on the last chapter! They brightened up my day (and my inbox).

So, welcome to the start of part four and the second half of the story overall. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think. As always, if you have any questions, need me to clarify anything or just want to discuss, send me a message here or on Twitter. : )

* * *

**Chapter Forty-Four**

**…****one step.**

**Elizabeth**

**Thursday, 22nd November, 2018**

**10:59 AM**

Elizabeth's eyelids fluttered open, only for her to screw them shut again as a wall of white light slammed into her. She groaned, rolled over, and then buried her face in the pillow and breathed in the scent that was anything but home. With her eyelids still clenched shut, she pushed herself up to sitting. She cracked open one eye, and when the throb in her head surged and then settled again to a faint pulse, she prised open the other one too.

Sunlight flooded in through the window, and it felt as though it echoed off everything, from the oak furniture to the alabaster walls and even the motes of dust that spiralled through the hallway outside. Though her muscles screamed and strained against her, she eased her legs over the edge of the bed, and then sat there, hunched forward, her head in her hands.

"How long've I been asleep?" Her voice rasped like nails over sandpaper, her mouth so parched it felt as though her tongue might crack.

"About eleven hours." Sarah's voice came from the corner by the door, the spot that whoever was supervising her normally occupied.

Elizabeth turned her head and stared at Sarah. "_Eleven hours_?"

Perched on the rickety spindle-back chair with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her spine as erect as Elizabeth's probably had been on her first ever day of school, the girl nodded, and the lenses of her glasses shot off another glimmer of that aching light.

_Eleven hours_. So, maybe that was the answer to a perfect night's sleep: a flashback, a panic attack, and teetering on the cusp of complete mental breakdown. Take that Ativan.

Elizabeth turned back to face the room. Her cardigan and the black woollen coat she'd worn the night before were draped across the padded stool that jutted out from beneath the dressing table, and her sneakers were stowed underneath. "And where's my stuff? My bag?"

"In the office."

"Right." She paused for a moment longer, as though she needed to will herself into each movement, and then she braced herself against her thighs and heaved herself up to standing.

"Where are you going?"

"To get my stuff." She padded over the carpet, the fibres bristling around her toes, and then wrestled on her cardigan and coat over her crumpled tee and sleep-creased jeans. She snatched up the sneakers and slung their backs over her fingers.

"But… Dr Sherman said she wanted to speak to you." Sarah rose from her seat and hovered in the doorway. With her hands clasped in front of her, she rubbed at the knuckle of her fourth finger. "She said you weren't to leave yet."

"Okay." Elizabeth gave a stilted shrug, and then turned sideways and slipped through the gap between Sarah and the door frame. "How long will she be?"

The squeak of footsteps chased Elizabeth as Sarah scurried after her along the linoleum towards the stairwell at the far end. "That depends on when she set off."

"You don't say," Elizabeth muttered.

When they reached reception, Sarah motioned to the array of empty seats, and without stopping, she continued onwards to the corridor that led to the office. "If you'll just wait here, I'll get your bag for you and see if Dr Sherman's on her way."

One of the DS agents, Gerry, stood guard inside the glass doors. Elizabeth flashed her a taut smile. She could only imagine what had been said about last night at the handover this morning.

Gerry sent her a nod and the wisp of a smile in reply. "Good morning, ma'am."

Elizabeth held onto the back of the rose-coloured couch whilst she tugged on her sneakers. At least the lack of laces made it easy to pull them on and off; that was probably the closest she would get to a silver lining. She walked over to the water dispenser in the corner and filled up one of the plastic cups; the bubbles glugged up to the top of the bottle as the water flowed down.

She raised the cup to her lips and chugged back the water. It was so cold that it made her throat clench, but she couldn't remember the last time she had anything to drink, so she forced it down and then refilled the cup and drained that one too. She scrunched up the cup with a crackle of plastic and tossed it into the bin next to the dispenser.

"Here's your bag." Sarah strode towards reception. Elizabeth's bag swayed from one hand. "And Dr Sherman shouldn't be long, maybe ten minutes. So, if you'd like to wait here—"

"I'll wait outside." Elizabeth took the bag from her and stepped towards the glass doors.

But Sarah and Gerry shared a look, one wary enough that Elizabeth might as well have announced she was planning to walk a tightrope over a pit of half-starved tigers whilst blindfolded. Though, perhaps they'd find that preferable; they probably thought she'd stand a better chance of succeeding at that than she would at managing to make it one step beyond the outer set of doors.

Elizabeth looked between them. "I'm not planning on freaking out again, but good to know that's where we're at."

Gerry shook her head, almost pityingly. "We're not judging, ma'am."

"Really?" Elizabeth arched her eyebrows at her. "Because, to be honest, I'd judge you if you weren't judging me right now." She paused, and then turned to Sarah. "I feel fine. So, just do the thing—" She fumbled her fingers in the direction of the keypad next to the door, though the digits were already impressed on her mind.

Sarah rubbed the knuckle of her fourth finger again, and she cast a glance towards Gerry before taking a half-step and then another and then another, stuttering her way towards the wall. She raised her finger to the keypad, and then paused and looked back over her shoulder. "Are you sure? Because I'm only an trainee, and if you did frea—" She blushed and her gaze swivelled sideways. "…have a panic attack…"

"I feel fine," Elizabeth said, but hidden in her pocket, she nudged her wedding band around and around using the tip of her thumb. "Though you building this up into a big deal isn't going to help. So, just—" She tipped her head towards the keypad.

The pink in Sarah's cheeks crimsoned, and she returned to the keypad. She brushed a lock of chestnut hair that had escaped her loose plait back behind her ear, and then prodded in the code; she laboured over each digit, as though she were retrieving them one by one from separate memory stores.

A pause, and then the door swooshed open.

Elizabeth waited. The movement of her thumb against her wedding ring quickened, whilst Sarah and Gerry watched her, expectant, at first as though they thought she had simply not noticed the door opening and they were urging her on with their looks, and then as though they were anticipating her spiral into panic and they were considering what to do and when.

Still, Elizabeth waited. Her mind groped out, searching for the first licks of fear that would spread like ice spidering through her veins, the tingling in her fingers and toes that would build like pinpricks of black ink across a blank page until they formed a solid block of numb, the jolts of pain that would shoot through her chest before each breath was left ragged and robbed of oxygen.

Nothing. Yet still she waited.

"Ma'am?"

Elizabeth glanced to Gerry.

"Do you want me to—?" Gerry gestured towards the outer doors.

Elizabeth nodded. Her voice softened. "Please."

Gerry stepped into the gap between the two sets of doors. She strode far enough forward that the second panel of glass slid open and the scent of aged rainfall tumbled in on a waft of crisp air.

Elizabeth took a breath that rolled to the bottom of her lungs, and when her chest didn't tighten around it and squeeze it back out, she stopped spinning her ring. It was time. She could do it. She could make it through the doorway. Both doorways.

She swung her bag into the opposite hand and then strode out through the first set of doors. Her breath had frozen in her chest, and for a moment it felt like her heart had stopped. And perhaps she couldn't do it, perhaps she was destined to be stuck inside those walls forever, perhaps the panic was lying in wait and it wasn't a matter of 'if' but 'when' she would succumb.

But her reflections passed in a flash out of the corner of each eye, a thousand versions of herself that walked alongside her, until they disappeared, absorbed back into her as she stepped over the threshold.

She stopped on the concrete slabs outside. She closed her eyes, and let the breath rush out. In reality, it was only one step more than she had taken the night before, but it felt as though in a single stride she had made it further than she had ever travelled on all her trips overseas combined. It wasn't just a step; it was freedom. She could leave. She could do it. There was nothing to stop her.

She allowed herself a small smile, and at Gerry's touch against her upper arm, she opened her eyes and smiled at Gerry too. "Thank you, Gerry."

Elizabeth took a seat further along the concrete, where the slabs rose up to form a ledge next to the gravel. With her bag resting behind her, she huddled her coat around her and stared out along the track that wound through the paper birch trees and towards the arrow-tipped gates at the end. Two of the black SUVs peeked out from behind the grey stone pillars, one on either side, whilst the other remained in the car park, the limbs of the black walnut tree reflected in the sheen of its bodywork.

For the first time in as long as she could remember, that dream hadn't plagued her the night before. Yet it felt as though it still lurked in the darkened passages of her mind, waiting for her to drop her guard and then it would spring out. And of course, there were the other images too, along with the sounds and smells and tastes and sensations, that could transport her back in an instant, if she allowed them to. But that wouldn't happen again.

"Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth twisted around. Sarah had appeared next to her, a bowl in one hand, a mug in the other. Both released swirls of steam into the brisk air.

She crouched down and placed them on the concrete. "I know you missed lunch and dinner yesterday, so if you want anything else to eat before you go, just let me know."

"Thank you." Elizabeth picked up the mug and cradled it to her chest, both the heat and the aroma of coffee lent her a warmth that spread through her, and it was almost enough to make her feel snug despite the late fall chill. "How long have you been working here?"

Sarah had stepped away, but she stopped and turned around again. "A couple of months."

Elizabeth placed the coffee down and then balanced the bowl of oatmeal in her lap. A spoon jutted from the edge, and she used it to swirl the dollop of raspberry jam through the oats, until beige turned to mottled pink. "You know, my daughter's an intern. She must be a couple of years older than you. When she first started out, she was as nervous as you are right now, but she soon grew into the role. Sure, she still thinks she's going to get fired every other day, but she's definitely more confident than before." She raised her gaze to Sarah, who hovered a couple of paces away, once again rubbing at the knuckle of her fourth finger. "You'll get there too."

She lifted the spoon and blew on it, and then took a tentative bite. After not eating for so long, the slightly sweet and utterly creamy warmth should have been something to savour, but like everything else recently, it lacked depth, and it clagged on her tongue.

"You must be looking forward to seeing her again. Your daughter."

Elizabeth stuck the spoon in the oatmeal, and sipped from her coffee. "You'd think so."

Sarah paused, her mouth open. A frown furrowed her brow. She sounded uncertain as she spoke, as though sure she must have misunderstood. "You're not excited to be going home?"

Elizabeth shook her head and set her hair swaying around her shoulders; the flicked ends tickled the line of her jaw. She took another bite of oatmeal. "No. Not right now."

She placed the bowl down on the concrete, and returned to cradling the coffee instead, as though the physical heat could muster something else, that indefinable warmth that normally came with thoughts of home.

"Well, maybe you're just nervous. Maybe you'll feel differently when you get home."

"Maybe." She stared down the track as a red hatchback turned off the road and trundled between the two black SUVs. Its indicator continued to blink as it squeezed through the gap between the stone pillars, and then the light cut off as the car picked up speed once more. The gravel rumbled beneath the car's tyres as it surged towards the clinic.

"Your husband will certainly be glad to see you."

Her voice lowered to a mutter. "Somehow I don't think he will."

Sarah fidgeted out of the corner of her eye. "But he's always calling to see how you're doing. Every morning and every evening, without fail."

Elizabeth twisted her head around to face Sarah. "Is he now?"

Sarah nodded, a series of quick bobs, and the corners of lips flicked upwards, as though she thought that were a good thing.

Elizabeth returned to her coffee. "Well, that sounds healthy." She took a swig, and then clunked the mug back onto the concrete. When she looked up at Sarah, the young woman met her with a puzzled expression. Elizabeth forced a smile. "Thank you for the breakfast."

"Oh…no problem." Sarah's cheeks flushed. She backed away a step, and pointed towards the clinic. "Did you want me to let your husband know that you'll be home this afternoon?"

"I can't go home."

Sarah's brow creased. "But…the paperwork's all done. You're free to go whenever you want."

"It's not about paperwork."

Sarah paused. "Then…?"

The car ground its way into the car park and lurched to a halt in the area designated for staff vehicles. Its brakes let out a slight whine.

Elizabeth braced herself against her knees and pushed herself up to standing. Her muscles were still taut and they pulled back against each movement as though a set of invisible strings were tethering her down. She dusted off her hands against her jeans, and turned to Sarah. "I can leave, but I can't go home, and that's something I hope you never understand."

Because home wasn't a place, it was a feeling. And in order to get there, you had to feel something other than anger, grief, guilt, loneliness, pain, exhaustion, fear, panic, loathing, emptiness…lost.

"Then where will you go?" Sarah asked.

The car door shut with a thud that echoed up into the air, and it was only with the silence that it brought that Elizabeth noticed there had been birdsong before.

Elizabeth's voice turned distant, no more than a murmur. "I'm not sure."

"Well, for your own safety, we normally advise clients that they don't stay on their own—"

"Noted." She gave Sarah another stiff smile. "Thank you."

"Elizabeth." Dr Sherman scrunched across the gravel towards the clinic. She clutched the open fronts of her woollen cardigan together in front of her chest. Her handbag hung from the crook of her elbow and swayed with each step.

"Dr Sherman." Elizabeth greeted her with a nod.

"I'm glad I caught you. I wanted us to talk before you go."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	47. Chapter Forty-Five: can't have Thanks

**Chapter Forty-Five**

**…****can't have Thanksgiving without conflict.**

**Stevie**

**11:03 AM**

Crisp morning light flowed up the staircase along with the murmur of voices from the television in the lounge; it was the kind of light that made the day feel fresh, as though cleansed of all that had come before. But as Stevie plodded down the stairs, Uncle Will's words still weaved circles through her mind—his warning that her mother was planning to run, and his insistence that she stop her. Why he would want to stop her, Stevie didn't know; what bothered her more was the fact that, if it was true, if her mother really had been intending to run, then why hadn't she said anything? Why keep it hidden and hold her at a distance?

Stevie clung to the newel cap, and the mahogany squeaked beneath her fingers as she spun down the last step and into the kitchen. "Hey, guys."

With her headphones on and her gaze fixed on her sketchbook whilst she swept her pencil across the page, Alison didn't so much as look up from the table, but hunched on the stool at the end of the kitchen island and staring at the screen of his cell phone, Jason twisted around and gave her a half-nod of acknowledgement as she padded past and towards the refrigerator.

"Hey, honey." Her father offered her a strained smile, and then dumped a bundle of carrots and a peeler in front of Jason. "Here, Jase. Do these, will you?"

Jason pulled a face, one that said he'd rather take the trash out for the next month than peel a bunch of carrots. "Do we really have to do Thanksgiving this year?"

"Yes."

"But why? Mom's not even here."

The glass bottles that nestled in the door of the refrigerator clinked against one another as Stevie pulled it open. She scoured the shelves, whilst the yellow light flooded out along with the faint chill, and then she plucked the Tupperware tub of Bircher muesli from the back of the second shelf, where someone had tucked it behind the pots of strawberry and raspberry yoghurt and a rather questionable head of iceberg lettuce, the outer leaves of which were beginning to slime and brown.

"Because…it's tradition." Their father returned to peeling the potatoes in the middle of the counter, whilst Stevie elbowed the refrigerator door shut and then tugged open one of the drawers and rifled free a teaspoon.

"In some countries it's tradition to eat the ashes of dead relatives," Jason said, "but you don't see us lining up to do that."

Their father studied him for a long moment, his expression a picture of horrified bemusement, as though he were debating whether it was wise to argue or even question that point, or perhaps simply wondering where the hell it had come from. Then— "Just peel the carrots."

Stevie spooned a dollop of the Bircher muesli into her mouth as she hovered on the opposite side of the island. Its apple-sweet and creamy taste coated her tongue, lifted by the kick of cinnamon. She dragged the spoon through the oat and yoghurt mixture, and cast the occasional glance at her father as she searched for a way to segue into the conversation. "So…I stopped by the hospital after work yesterday, thought I'd talk to Uncle Will."

Jason shot her a look. "The fact that you spent your evening talking to a coma patient really ought to tell you something about the state of your social life."

Stevie glared at him. Perhaps it wouldn't have stung so much were it not gritted with grains of truth. In the pause, she dislodged the oats from her front teeth using the tip of her tongue. "You know, technically he's not comatose anymore; he's minimally conscious."

"Oh, I stand corrected."

"And I didn't spend all evening there. I got a coffee too."

Jason stopped midway through peeling a carrot. He raised his eyebrows at her. "On your own?"

Stevie's scowl deepened. She opened her mouth to protest, but their father held his hand out and motioned for her to stop whilst he turned to Jason. "Jase, just go play a video game or something. Leave your sister alone."

"Sounds like she's already got that covered." Jason dropped the peeler to the counter with a clatter and then pushed himself down from the stool. His voice lowered to a mutter as he strode away towards the couch. "Can't have Thanksgiving without conflict."

The scrape of the peeler against the potatoes filled the lull until the video game kicked in and the echoes of explosions and ricochet of gunfire subsumed everything else. Stevie returned to her muesli, the creaminess now cloying and the apple tarter than before. Every so often her father would glance towards his cell phone where it rested next to the stovetop, as though half expecting, half dreading that it would ring. Another thing she probably ought to ask about.

But this time he glanced up at her instead. "So, how is he? Will."

Stevie nodded as she swallowed her mouthful and raised her fist to her lips. "Good. Apparently the doctors are optimistic… So, that's something." She stared down into the plastic tub as she dragged the spoon along the bottom. "He actually woke up for a little bit while I was there, though he got all weird and agitated. I think he thought I was Mom at first."

"There's a slight similarity."

She scowled at him. "I look nothing like her."

He shot her a look—_Are you kidding?_

She shook her head and let it slide. Debating that would only take them away from the point. "Anyway… He said something… Something about needing to tell Mom not to run."

Her father said nothing. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the potato in his hand as he peeled away the skin strip by strip.

"He said that she was going to run, and that I needed to stop her."

Still nothing. He dropped the potato into the saucepan of cold water that rested atop the stove, another glance at his cell phone, and then he picked up the next potato from the pile in the middle of the countertop.

"And at first I thought maybe he meant running away from something, but then I thought…maybe he was talking about the presidency."

"Stevie—" Her father shook his head, and though he tried to smile, it looked more like a grimace. "I'm not even sure if he knows what decade he's in right now."

"But was she going to?"

"Going to what?"

Stevie rolled her eyes. "Run for the presidency."

He placed the peeler down on the countertop, and then braced himself against the marble and met her gaze; as he did, the deep circles that sagged beneath his eyes became all the more prominent. He raised his shoulders in a stilted shrug. "I don't know."

Her eyes narrowed. "But Uncle Will thought she was."

"Uncle Will is just coming out of a coma."

"So, you think he's delusional?"

"I think that it's perfectly reasonable for anyone to assume that she was planning to run, given her role in the administration. I also think he could have been talking about anything." He picked up the peeler again and another potato from the pile. "Your mom didn't make a lot of sense when she was first coming round, and Uncle Will's been out for much longer."

"So, you think it's just his imagination?"

"Possibly."

Stevie chewed on the inside of her cheek. _Possibly_. Not probably. Not definitely. Though she should possibly, probably, definitely let it go. But she didn't. "She was going to run, wasn't she?"

He chucked the peeler down and the metal clattered against the marble. "Stevie…" He gripped the edge of the counter, and a wave of tension spread up from his hands and into his shoulders as he shook his head. "What does it even matter?"

"It matters because she should have told us, rather than hiding it from us."

"She wasn't hiding anything."

"Then how about outright lying?" Stevie pursed her lips and her nostrils flared whilst her father met her with a dark look, one that should have warned her to stop. "How many times did she tell me that she wasn't going to run? Yet clearly she was, and she had already told Uncle Will and God knows how many other people, and unless she didn't tell you, which I seriously doubt, then you're lying to me too."

"How am I lying to you?"

"By being all evasive and saying you don't know whether she was going to run or not."

"I don't know what she was going to do. And frankly, I don't care." He snatched up the peeler again, as if to mark the end of the conversation. But then he lowered his voice and added, "And I don't see why you care either."

Stevie's eyes widened. How could he not see? "I care because it affects me."

He huffed. "What happened to wanting to be part of something bigger?"

"To be part of it. Not to have it just happen to me, like everything else."

He tossed the last potato into the pan, and then turned his back on her and flipped on the faucet of the sink in front of the window. The water gushed down, and the spray arced and flailed over the draining board as he rinsed his hands in the torrent. He jammed it off again, and then grabbed the green gingham tea towel from the side, and gripped it over his hands as he rubbed them dry, still keeping his back to her, whilst in the background, the _chh-chh-chh-chh_ of gunfire from Jason's video game continued to ring out.

Stevie bit down on the inside of her cheek. "We have a right to know. She shouldn't have made that decision without us."

Her father stopped. He flung the tea towel onto the countertop, and then turned around to face her. He rested back against the marble, and folded his arms across his chest. "Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way. And I'm sorry that this matters more to you than your mother's health. I thought we raised you to have more compassion than that."

Stevie drew back, her nose wrinkled. "This has nothing to do with Mom's health. This is about the fact that she made a decision, and then lied about the decision, and hid all this stuff from us, even though she knew that it would affect us."

He held her gaze and shook his head, his jaw clenched. "She hadn't made a decision—"

Stevie opened her mouth to protest: If Uncle Will knew, then she must have made her decision and told him. But her father held up one hand as he raised his voice and spoke over her.

"—but perhaps if she had made the decision and had just done what she wanted for a change, rather than worrying so much about how it would affect you and your uncle and everybody else, then she wouldn't have been meeting him that day in the restaurant."

He swept his hand towards the door, and his voice rose louder still. "Then perhaps neither of them would have been poisoned, and she wouldn't have exhausted herself trying to look after him and she wouldn't have ended up in the state that she's in now."

The look in his eyes darkened, and his voice strained as though he were trying to rein it back from a shout, but each word flung itself forward. "Then perhaps she wouldn't be feeling so guilty about what happened that she decided to check herself out of the clinic in the middle of the night, so that she could get back to the hospital and try to fix him."

The blare of the video game cut out, and its absence echoed into the silence and made his voice twice as loud in comparison. "Then perhaps this conversation would actually be relevant. But as it is, your mother would rather prioritise you and your uncle and everybody else over her own mental health, so now she can't even step one foot outside of the clinic without having a panic attack, so you have no need to worry about whether or not she was planning to run or how it might _affect_ you if she were to become president."

Stevie's mind reeled. Alison stared into the kitchen, her headphones now draped around her neck and blasting out silence, whilst Jason crept half-step by half-step over from the couch. With the pinches in their brows and their concerned pouts, they had never looked more alike, and it was enough to knock more than a decade off their ages, rendering them just children again, caught in the tangle of not knowing what was wrong and the feeling that something wasn't right.

What they asked their father, Stevie didn't know; sound blurred beneath the thrum of her own pulse, lost to the hum of her thoughts. She ought to have shared in their concern, ought to have worried if her mother was okay or not. But her gaze was stuck in the distance, on the path ahead crumbling apart, whilst the stretch behind her turned to dust, as though one end worked backwards from a McCord White House, whilst the other worked forwards from her decision to put her own life on hold so that she could support her mother in her job. It left her stranded, on a patch of the present, a piece of the now that drifted. She had only wanted to be part of something bigger, to help her mother make a difference in the world, but in deciding to leave the clinic, to physically and mentally check out, her mother had blown that plan—and every shred of sacrifice that had gone into it—completely, utterly, apart.

Stevie snapped back into focus. She dumped the empty tub of Bircher muesli down on the kitchen island, the teaspoon abandoned amidst the last streaks of apple-pinkened oats and yoghurt, and she stormed up the stairs. Her bare soles thumped off the wooden steps. A stray sneaker, just the one, lay tongue-side down on a step halfway to the top. _If you lose one shoe, how do you keep going with the other?_ Perhaps you take the other one off, or you find a new pair, ones that aren't liable to getting lost. She kicked the sneaker aside, and though part of her knew it was childish, the childish part of her fed off the _whump_ and clatter as it bounced down the steps.

"Stevie," her father called after her.

But the shout was lost as she strode into her bedroom and shoved the door shut. She stopped, leant back against the wood, and took a breath. She couldn't let herself drift, buoyed on the tide of her mother's decisions, succumbing to the rise and fall, recover or not, run or not.

She pushed herself away from the door and grabbed the faux-leather handbag from the foot of the bed. She dumped it atop the padded seat of the vanity chair in front of the dressing table, and as it slouched there, she rifled through the clutter of cheap plastic sunglasses, once-used biros, stray sanitary towels and loose tampons until her fingers landed on the rough slip of corrugated cardboard that hid at the bottom. She grabbed her cell phone from where it lay atop the bedside table, and yanked it free from the white charger lead that tethered it to the wall. She paced back and forth as she tapped in the number scrawled across the sleeve of the coffee cup.

'_Hey. It's Stevie. So, I can't remember the last time I went to the movies either, and my taste in music is questionable unless you're into acoustic pop, but coffee sounds good, and small talk even better. Let me know when your shift ends, and maybe we can meet up.'_

Message sent.

"Stevie?" Her father's voice called through the door, tentative. A pause, and then he eased the door open and hovered in the gap, his fingers still clutching the handle, his other hand rested against the frame. "Can we talk?"

Stevie scowled at him, and plugged the charger back into the phone.

He stepped inside anyway, and pushed the door to behind him. He massaged his brow for a moment, and then let his hand fall back to his side. "I'm sorry. It's been a long night, and I'm worried about your mother, but that's no excuse—"

"Well, perhaps you should stop worrying about her. After all, why should we keep going out of our way to help her if she's just going to give up on herself?"

He frowned. "I'm sorry, what?"

"If she leaves the clinic, she'll lose her job, and then she'll just be sat around here or at the hospital, and how long until she's back to how she was before? Or worse?"

He pursed his lips, and fear, or perhaps a kind of sorrow, tinged his expression. It made every line sink a touch deeper. "She can get better."

"And I hope that she does, but I'm not just going to sit around and wait for it to happen. I want my own life too, one that isn't defined by her decisions." Her cell phone bleeped. She snatched it up, glanced at the screen, and then tugged it free of the charger. "I'm going out."

One hand steadied her against the wall as she stuffed her feet into the black and white patterned pumps that lay on the carpet in front of the closet. "Jason's right: Doing Thanksgiving this year's pointless."

She grabbed up her handbag too, and then pushed past her father on the way to the door.

"Stevie."

She stopped, her fingers curled around the chill chrome of the handle.

"She didn't lie to you. She might have been thinking about running, but she hadn't made up her mind, and she wanted to be certain before telling you."

Stevie turned her chin to her shoulder, her father just visible out of the corner of her eye. "Well, as you said, that's kind of irrelevant now, isn't it?"

* * *

**Thank you for reading, and thank you for your comments!**


	48. Chapter Forty-Six: struggling to brea

**Chapter Forty-Six**

**…****struggling to breathe.**

**Matt**

**11:07 AM**

"What are you doing here?" Jay met Matt with a puzzled frown as he peered through the gap into the hallway outside his apartment. One hand braced him against the door frame whilst the other clung to the handle of the door he had hauled open a second or two before.

"And a Happy Thanksgiving to you too." Matt offered him a broad smile, and then as the seconds dragged on into silence, he motioned towards the gap. "So, are you going to let me in?"

Jay shook off his expression, stepped back, and swung the door the rest of the way open. He held it there as Matt strode inside. "I thought you'd be heading back home."

"I am." Matt toed off his sneakers, not bothering to undo the laces, and he left them in a heap just inside the door. "Flight's this afternoon."

The _thump, thump, thump_ of Jay's sock-muffled footsteps followed Matt as he padded across the floorboards towards the three seater couch in the middle of the living area.

"But you thought you'd stop by here first."

Matt stooped over and picked up the pink bunny rabbit toy that lay tail-up on the cushions, and then propped it upright in the watery sunlight that spooled across the armrest. He twisted around, his eyebrows ever so slightly arched as he motioned to Jay's tee and sweatpants and then to the television on mute in the background. "Sorry to interrupt your plans."

Jay stared back at him. A slight frown marked his brow. But then his expression eased and he conceded the point with small nod. With one hand still on his hip, he hiked a thumb towards the kitchenette behind him. "Drink?"

"Just a coffee, thanks." Matt sank down onto the couch. The cushions collapsed around him. He rolled up the sleeves of his v-neck, and then hunched forward in his seat and rested his elbows to his thighs. "Not seeing Chloe today?"

Jay grabbed a mug from the tree tucked into the corner of the countertop. He bristled slightly at the question, but then shook his head and clunked the mug down. "Not today, no."

He snatched the pot from the coffee maker and poured out a mugful. The steam spiralled up and disappeared into the air, its wisps wafting away like the threads of the conversation, until all that was left was the slightly bitter aroma and the hum from the refrigerator in the background.

He padded back over to the couch and held out the mug to Matt, and then slumped down onto the cushion at the opposite end and retrieved his own half-drunk mug from the floor where it nestled against the foot of the sofa. He picked up the remote control from the armrest and zapped the television screen to black. He looked at Matt. "So, are you going to tell me what this is really about?"

"I want to know what's going on with you."

Jay sipped his coffee, and held Matt's gaze over the brim. "Nothing's going on with me."

"Dude, come on."

He gave a kind of shrug, as if to say—_'Come on' what?_

"You've been acting off for weeks."

"I don't know if you've happened to notice, but things have been kind of hectic for the past few weeks."

Matt shot him a look. "Someone tried to kill the secretary, I know."

"It's not the assassination attempt that's the problem."

"You're right." Matt shook his head. Then he stilled and met Jay with a hard stare. His expression sobered. "It's your attitude that's the problem."

Jay drew back. "Excuse me?"

"You used to be the secretary's guy, but it's like you gave up on her the moment you saw her shouting at her brother to wake up from his coma."

Jay gave a huff, whilst a wry smile twisted his lips. "You might want to take a minute and reexamine that statement before you question my judgment."

Matt pivoted around so that he faced Jay fully, one leg folded across the cushion in front of him. "Whatever happened to St Jay, patron of the long shot?"

Jay cringed slightly and shook his head, avoiding Matt's gaze. "This isn't some plan to get a team back to the negotiating table or coming up with inducements. It's…" He stilled, and his gaze turned distant as he stared out beyond the bare alabaster wall behind the television.

"It's what?" Matt's grip on his mug tightened, though the heat of the coffee pressed through the ceramic and stung his fingertips. "Mental illness?"

Jay cast him a sideways glance.

Matt wrinkled his nose. "It's okay to say it, you know. It's not a dirty word."

Jay's brow furrowed. His tone sharpened. "I know it's not a dirty word, but that doesn't mean that this is some fairytale and she's magically going to recover." He flung a gesture towards the doorway as though to sweep the notion out into the gutter where it belonged, along with other such fanciful ideas as the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas. He bowed his head, another slight shake. "Look, I've seen this before."

Matt pursed his lips, whilst his own frown settled across his brow. "You might have seen others before, but you haven't seen this. Everybody's story is different."

"Maybe… But this job will always put her at risk of trauma, and if she can't handle it, she'll just go from crisis to crisis to crisis." Jay bounced his hand three times to emphasise the point, and then he returned to clutching his mug. "I know you want to think that she'll get better, but some people don't."

"And some people do."

Jay shrugged, as though it weren't even worth his effort debating that, and then he took a long sip of coffee. The sunlight that streamed through the window behind caught on the glass covering over the face of his watch and threw off a glimmer, a chink of white light that obscured the time, whilst in the background the refrigerator continued to drone, disrupted only by the scrabble and _coo-coo-coo_ of pigeons on the window ledge outside.

Matt bent down and placed his mug on the floor. He returned to Jay. Being a speechwriter, it ought to have been easy to find the words, but sometimes the more of himself the words would expose, the harder they were to come by. Especially when they meant facing up to his own failures. He could just say that anyone could recover, truly recover, if they had the right support. No magic required. Just a lot of patience and a willingness to listen. But it would be no more than a platitude, the kind of speech that the secretary would return to him labelled as a 'second draft' whilst telling him that 'his heart wasn't really in it'. And words—the right words—had the power to change thoughts, people, history. Though to do so, they had to be carefully chosen and crafted, like gems of truth, mined and cut, until their edges were so sharp that they could chip away at the facades people wore and force them to confront themselves—their true selves—hidden in the vulnerable flesh beneath. And where did those gems come from? To find the hardest ones, the ones with real strength, you had to be willing to delve deep into the self.

Matt pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and then braced his hands against his thighs, his palms clammy against the rough denim. "When I was fourteen, my sister developed anorexia and depression." Though Jay twisted around to study him, a flash of surprise lighting his expression, Matt kept his gaze on the cushion in between them. "At the time, a lot of people said that she wouldn't recover, that it was a waste of time and effort trying to help her. But our parents refused to believe them. They got her the help that she needed, but more than that, they took the time to listen to her, even when what she was saying made no sense to them."

His lips curled into a fond smile. "I remember how they used to take her to this cake shop, one that we went to every week as children, and they'd always order this chocolate fudge cake—I mean, real Bruce Bogtrotter style chocolate fudge cake—and they'd sit there and eats theirs, and they'd talk to my sister, no expectations. At first my sister didn't want to be seen dead there; it was like she was worried that people would think she was eating cake too and would think she was fat because of it, or maybe she was scared she might inhale a crumb and gain ten pounds. I don't know. But our parents insisted on taking her there week after week, even though people said it was pointless—I mean, she was afraid of low-fat yoghurt and diet soda, so she was never going to touch a cake, let alone eat a slice. But then, one week, she had a bite. Then she freaked out. Then a few weeks later, she had another bite. Then she freaked out again, a little less that time. And so they kept taking her back week after week, and a year or so and a whole lot of counselling later, she was ordering and eating her own slice. Now, whenever she's back in town, she takes her daughter and our mom to that same shop, and what she once feared has somehow become a tradition. And every time she goes and every time she takes a bite of that cake, it's like she's proving all those people who said she'd never recover wrong."

He forced himself to meet Jay's eye. "I was one of those people. Everything you've said about the secretary in the past few weeks, I said that, and worse, about my sister."

He shook his head, and his gaze fell away again. No matter what expression Jay met him with, he deserved something far harsher. "At the time, I was suffering with really bad asthma. I lost most of my adolescence to trips to the doctor and lengthy stays on hospital wards. I lost friends too. So, for my sister, someone who was perfectly well physically, to 'choose' to get ill and to stay ill…" His chest tightened around the words. "I _hated_ her. I hated who she became. I hated this stranger who was willing to throw her life away when my next asthma attack might end mine. So, I distanced myself. My parents asked me to join them on their trips to the cake shop, but I didn't want any part in it. I didn't see why I should waste my time on someone who was never going to recover and who didn't value her life. I'd like to say that I'd been there that day when she finally ate that slice of cake, but the truth is I'd long since given up on her."

He massaged his brow, though the furrows gripped too tight and dug too deep for him to smooth them away. "It was only recently, a few years ago, when my sister was expecting her daughter, that we actually talked about that time, I mean properly talked. She told me how much it had hurt her that I'd turned my back on her, that it made her feel even more alone and worthless, that she was already frightened but to have me look at her like a stranger… it made her feel like there was no hope, so what was the point in even trying. It was only then that I realised that all the time I'd been struggling to breathe physically, she'd been struggling to breathe mentally. And perhaps if I'd been a little more supportive from the beginning, if I'd even attempted to understand, then maybe she would have recovered much sooner."

Jay continued to study him. "So, this thing, with the secretary, this is what? Your atonement?"

"No." Matt shook his head. He rolled up the cuff of his jeans and revealed the tattoo of a black semicolon hidden behind the curve of his right ankle. "This was. Well, the commitment it symbolises was. My sister came to me because she was worried that being pregnant and giving birth might lead to a relapse or trigger postnatal depression, so I had this tattoo done to show her that this time, no matter what happened, I'd be there to help her." He pushed the cuff down again. "It hurt like hell, and I'm pretty sure our mother wouldn't approve, but it means something. It means that just because you suffer with mental illness, your story isn't over."

He lifted his mug of coffee from the floor, took a sip, and then balanced it against his knee. With his gaze rested once more on the cushions between him and Jay, he nudged his glasses back into place. "This thing with the secretary… I don't want to make the same mistake again, and I don't know what's going on with you or what experiences you've had that make you feel like it's not worth standing up for her, but I don't want you to make that mistake either. She can get better, and she will get better, but we've got to support her."

Still hunched forward in his seat, Jay clutched his own mug of coffee in the gap between his knees. He stared down into the mug for a while, as though considering that point, but then he turned and looked at Matt. His expression was tinged with a bitterness that betrayed his facade of a smile. "Abby wants to move to California."

Matt almost choked on a swig of coffee. "What?"

Jay's lips flinched to the side, and he forced a shrug. "Her partner's been offered a job, and her work have agreed to a transfer too, plus she's got family out there."

"But…what about Chloe?"

"She'll be going with her."

"But she can't do that, surely."

"Turns out she can." Jay reached down and rubbed away a black mark on the floorboard, perhaps more for the distraction than anything else. "I spoke to a lawyer, but seeing as Abby has primary custody and there's an argument that the move will benefit Chloe, then if it goes to court, they're likely to rule in her favour. I've said I'll go to mediation, but basically, whatever she says goes."

"But you're her father. That's got to count for something."

"Apparently not." He took a swig of coffee, and as he swallowed, a line of tension radiated along his jaw. "I might have raised her on my own for the first six months while Abby was too depressed to get out of bed, let alone look after her, but now I'm lucky if I see her twice a week. And it's my fault for letting the job take over." He gestured as he spoke, whilst the edge to his voice sharpened. "I mean, I put the job before my marriage, before my daughter, I've even risked my life for it, but I've always rationalised it by saying that I'm helping make the world a better place, that the work we do will improve Chloe's future."

Matt's lips had tightened into a bud, and he gave a firm nod. "It does."

"But what do you think will happen if the secretary quits?" Jay let his gaze flit over Matt for a long second, and the heft of the question weighed down the pause. "What do you think will happen if she doesn't win the next election?" He shook his head and turned away again. "Teresa Hurst might be planning to run, but she has no real shot at the White House, which means one of the parties taking over. And it doesn't matter which one; both are just waiting for the opportunity to destroy Dalton's legacy and to systematically tear apart everything that we've worked for."

"So, you're saying it's the secretary or nothing?"

"Basically." Jay nodded, took one last swig of coffee, and then clunked the mug down onto the floorboards. "We've invested so much in this, in her vision, and if she just checks out now…"

It was true. In running as an independent, and adopting the secretary's vision of foreign policy, Dalton had made them all dependent on his successor. If the secretary didn't make it to the White House, or at least maintain her position at State with the full backing of the new president, then all the reforms she had brought in would be picked apart. A legacy left in tatters.

Matt clasped his hands around his coffee cup and then gave a shrug as nonchalant as his smile. "Well, if worst comes to worst and we all lose our jobs, at least there'll be nothing stopping you from moving to California."

Jay chuckled, though the sound was hollow and more than a little bitter. "I don't want to move to California." With his hands braced against his thighs, he pushed himself up from the couch and wandered away towards the window behind. He leant against the ledge and stared out of the glass; the sunlight flooded through around him and cast a shadow that stretched all the way to the opposite wall. "A McCord White House. That's what I signed up for."

Matt wrinkled his nose. "So, she's got your vote, but you're not willing to stand up for her?"

Jay turned around. He rested back against the ledge, and folded his arms across his chest. "In order to get my vote, she's got to get her name on the ballot." He shrugged. "And after this, I don't know if she even wants it, let alone if she can stand the pressure."

Matt's expression sobered. "She's stronger than you give her credit for." He rose from the couch and turned to face Jay, his coffee cup clutched in one hand and held so close to his chest that the warmth seeped through his v-neck. "I believe that people can get through anything, if they have the right support, and maybe that's just me being a dreamer, but the reality is this: if you give up on her now, then it won't matter whether she gets better or not, because the damage will be done. The trust will be gone. And you can try to make amends, but nothing ever truly gets that back. So, you need to decide. Is a McCord White House worth fighting for? Are the deals she's negotiated worth fighting for? Is she worth fighting for? If the answer's no, then you should just go to California. Because you're right: it's the secretary or nothing, and if you're not making the world a better place for Chloe's future, then there's no reason why you shouldn't see her every day."

Silence flowed through the room, as thick as the sunlight.

Jay stared down through the floorboards, as though buried somewhere beneath them lay the answer—support the secretary or give up on her. Whether he wanted to prise them back and find that answer or not was a different question altogether.

Matt downed another mouthful of coffee, and then sloshed the rest into the sink. He gave the mug a quick rinse, and left it in the bottom. "Just think about it."

He padded over to his sneakers, stooped down and picked them up, and as he unthreaded the knots in the laces, he turned to Jay, ready to say that he'd see him on Monday, when hopefully Jay would be back to being the secretary's guy again. But then he stopped.

Jay was still staring down at the floor, his gaze so distant that it looked as though he was already wrapped up in a tangle of thought, and his shoulders sagged, perhaps weighed down by the decisions ahead of him and the infinite possibilities that branched from each. And maybe in his own way, beneath the pressures of work and home, he too was struggling to breathe.

"You okay, man?" Matt asked.

Jay raised his eyebrows, though it did nothing to cast aside that look. "Fine."

"Because I've got a few hours before my flight, so if you wanted to grab a beer…?"

Jay gave a shrug. "Sure." His tone and his expression said that he didn't care either way, but the response had come a fraction too quick. He motioned to his clothes, to the day-old sweatpants and crumpled t-shirt, and then to his bedroom. "I'll just go change."

He padded away, his footsteps soft against the floorboards. But then he stopped in the doorway and glanced back. "And I will think about it."

Matt nodded. After all, it had taken him fifteen years to learn his lesson; he couldn't expect Jay to reach the same understanding in the course of one conversation. Patience and a willingness to listen. It wasn't magic, yet in a lot of situations, from diplomacy to supporting a loved one or to being a friend, it did the trick. "Take your time."

* * *

**Note**: My gut tells me this chapter doesn't work, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why. After going through it so many times that I can practically recite it, I decided that I just had to leave it as it is. If anyone has any thoughts, please share. Ta.


	49. Chapter Forty-Seven: nostalgia

**Note**: Thank you for all your feedback on the last chapter! It is much appreciated.

* * *

**Chapter Forty-Seven**

**…****nostalgia.**

**Conrad**

**11:14 AM**

The door to Conrad's private study swung open and Russell strode straight in, his gaze fixed to the screen of the cell phone that nestled in his palm as he tapped out a message. "Morning, sir."

He motioned behind him, and one of the Secret Service agents who stood guard in the hall reached through and pulled the door closed again with a thud.

"Good morning, Russell." Conrad looked up from photo album that was splayed open across the coral pink ottoman bench in front of him. "And Happy Thanksgiving."

Russell ran one hand over his head and scratched at the back. "Well…Thanksgiving at least." He tossed his phone onto the bench and then slumped down into the brown leather armchair opposite the couch where Conrad sat. He motioned to the photo album, and the two closed ones stacked next to it. "Lydia warned me you're still in a funk."

"It's called nostalgia, Russell. It's not a disease."

"I think you'll find it used to be." Russell twisted to face the long mahogany desk in front of the windows. He spotted the pot of coffee, and pushed himself up again from the seat.

"Shouldn't you be at home with your family?"

"Yes, I should—" He cast a glance behind him. "—as Carol has already reminded me." He lowered his voice to a mutter. "Several times."

"And I'm sure she reminded you to go easy on the caffeine as well."

"Well, I can't say I wouldn't prefer something stronger, but I guess it's a little early." Russell poured out a cup. The steam billowed up, and as it caught the sunlight that diffused through the window, it wisped like a ghostly flame. "Unless, of course, you're partaking too—" He shot another glance behind him. "—in which case I'd just be keeping you company."

Conrad's brow furrowed. "Let's just stick to the coffee, shall we?"

Russell lowered himself into the seat. "Well, I'll let you reevaluate that decision in a minute." He snatched up his phone, and clicked the screen on and off again, though it had made no sound in the minute or so since he had left it, and then he balanced it on the arm of his chair.

Conrad's stomach tightened, like a knot slipping into place. "Why? What's happened?"

Russell's expression sobered. He took a breath, held it there, and then his shoulders slumped. The bags beneath his eyes darkened. "Last night, I received a couple of phone calls, or at least a couple of phone calls that are pertinent to this conversation. The first was from Elizabeth, threatening to discharge herself and catch a cab away from the clinic—"

Conrad's jaw clenched. "Tell me she didn't."

"I'm not sure if even she knew whether or not she was bluffing, so I told her detail to take her home and put her on lockdown until this morning. Not ideal, but it seemed like a temporary fix."

"But she must realise what would happen if the press got hold of this, not to mention the fact that the people behind the assassination attempt are still out there and she'd be seriously compromising her own safety."

"What can I say?" Russell tossed one hand up. "She's not thinking rationally."

Conrad rubbed his lip whilst his gaze lowered to the photo album open in front of him, the plastic covering dappled with the light from the chandelier overhead. "All the effort that's gone into keeping this quiet, to protecting her and giving her some privacy, and she decides to _catch a cab_ away from the clinic." The thought simmered beneath his skin, almost enough to distract from the tug of guilt that lingered beneath. His gaze flicked up to Russell. "You know, I actually thought she'd stay. That she'd see reason."

"I wish she had, sir." Russell massaged his brow, as though trying to ease away the furrows, but they only deepened. "Because then I wouldn't have received the second call."

Each _tock_ that echoed out from the grandfather clock in the corner pressed down upon the room, as though the sound not only diffused through the air, but bound each breath with lead.

His hand stilled and then fell back to his lap. "About fifty minutes later, her detail called to say that she made it as far as the entrance before having a flashback, or series of flashbacks, it's not clear, which led to a panic attack."

Conrad's stomach slumped. "How bad?"

"It took the staff over half an hour to calm her down."

Conrad hunched forward. With his palms pressed together and his fingertips rested against his lips, he shook his head to himself. "So much for her being ready to come home. She couldn't even make it one step outside the clinic."

"At least she was in the right place when it happened."

His gaze locked on Russell. "Just like how at least she was in the right place when she collapsed?" He stared at Russell until Russell's gaze wavered and dipped away, and then he pushed himself up from the couch, the cushions pitting around his fists, and he strode across the room to the cherry wood console table on the opposite side. "This whole situation's a mess."

He clinked the stopper out of the crystal decanter, and sloshed a glug of Scotch into each of two of the tumblers. "I don't know what's worse: her thinking that the world would be a better place without her in it, or her being forced to relive what happened again and again."

The amber liquid swirled up, and released its oak-aged scent tinged with smoke.

"Given the option," Russell said, "I know which one I'd pick."

Conrad strode back over, waited for Russell to place his cup of coffee down at the edge of the ottoman, and then pressed one of the glasses into his palm. He lowered himself onto the cushions of the couch, cradled the tumbler in one hand, and stared down into the Scotch before he raised it to his lips. Given the worst of his memories, the moments in which he had felt what it truly meant to be afraid to die, he too knew which one he would pick. He took a sip.

The silence gaped with the abrupt endlessness of that thought.

"So, what now?"

Russell hunkered forward, his own tumbler clutched in one hand; the liquid swayed as he tilted it from side to side. "She was too exhausted to go anywhere last night, so they took her back to her room, and she fell straight to sleep. She was still asleep when I last checked, but she's already discharged herself, so when she does wake up, technically she's free to leave." He lifted the glass to his lips, and then paused. "If she can make it past the door, that is."

"I don't suppose we can have DS detain her there?"

"That's what led to the cab incident last night, and to be honest, sir, it wouldn't help anyway. She needs to want this for herself."

"I guess that rules out having her placed under another hold as well."

"Unfortunately, you can't commit someone for having a panic attack or flashbacks. If that's how she wants to live…or exist, then that's up to her."

Conrad shook his head to himself and rested his glass in the sling of his hands between his knees. "But if she does leave…"

"She could be back to where she was a couple of weeks ago…or worse. As much as she might want it to, this won't go away on its own, and the next time she reaches a crisis…"

Conrad's frown deepened. "Who knows if she'll reach out." He took another sip, and this time, its bitter finish dragged down the back of his tongue and lingered on into the silence. The implication festered with it, and it twisted up everything inside until he felt the same fire-itch of frustration that crawled across the inside of his skin each time he learnt that Harrison had once again relapsed. He swept one hand towards the windows. "Why can't she just see that everyone wants to help her?"

Russell stared down into his tumbler. He raised his eyebrows, though his gaze never lifted from the drink. "Because sometimes the fear of getting help and what that entails is worse than the fear of what will happen if you don't."

"But she knows that if she leaves, I'll have no choice but to let her go."

"I don't think she cares. Apparently she didn't even care that Henry asked her to stay."

The clench in Conrad's jaw tightened. Bess might be as stubborn as all hell at times, but he could usually count on her to see reason. But to throw away her career, to endanger herself…

He pushed himself up from his seat and paced away towards the windows, as though the brightness of the sunshine might help lift the gloom that settled like a fog and drifted between his thoughts. "Maybe losing her job will help her, maybe it'll remove the target from her back and give her the peace that she needs."

"That's assuming that whoever's behind this will be satisfied with seeing her lose her job, and that this isn't some kind of personal vendetta against her."

Conrad spun back to face Russell.

Still hunched forward in the armchair, Russell shrugged. "Getting hold of the drug was easy enough, but bugging her brother's phone and getting access to her at the restaurant? That takes planning. If they're hell-bent on killing her, then losing her job's not going to help her. If anything it'll put her at even greater risk, because she'll no longer have her detail to protect her."

"We can't leave her stranded."

"We won't have much choice. If she's no longer secretary of state, DS can only continue to protect her for six months at the most, and that's only if she agrees to it." Russell downed the rest of his Scotch and then pushed the tumbler onto the ottoman. The glass clinked against the coffee cup. "And that's assuming that the people responsible don't make a second attempt the moment she leaves. They got past DS once. What's to stop them from doing it again? We don't have a clue who they are or why they targeted her, and the fact that they're being so quiet is more than disconcerting. They could be stood right in front of us, and we still wouldn't realise. Our only hope is that her brother can remember something, though given the fact that all the interviews so far have turned up diddly-squat, the chance of anything he says giving the FBI a lead is looking highly unlikely. And even if they do get a lead, who's to say they'll make an arrest in time? These people have had weeks to formulate a new plan, so all they need is for her to come out of hiding, to find a half-decent opportunity, and there you go, two secretary of states assassinated in as many terms, and when the press find out that we tried to cover the whole thing up, we'll have another scandal thrown into the bargain."

"I don't give a damn about the optics, Russell." Conrad's grip on the tumbler tightened, until it felt as though the glass might splinter. "I want a solution. One that will keep her safe."

"The solution is that she stays at the clinic." Russell's voice strained. "No one knows where she is, it buys the FBI time to figure out who's behind this, and more importantly, she can get her head straight." He paused. Seconds passed. Then he shrugged. "And if she doesn't, then DS will do their best, I suppose Henry will have to keep a close eye on her, and the files regarding her potential replacements are waiting in my office." His cell phone bleeped, and he snatched it up from the arm of the chair. His voice grew distant and the furrow in his brow deepened as he peered down at the screen. "None of them are Elizabeth, but then again, at the moment, nor is she."

"That coming from the man who once fought tooth and nail against her being offered the job in the first place." Conrad tipped back the last of his drink and then thunked the tumbler down onto the desk behind him.

"I stand by everything I said; the woman's a total nightmare. But she gets the job done." Russell rubbed his brow, and then let out a sharp sigh. "Or at least, she did." He tossed the phone down onto the ottoman. It bounced and landed next to the open photo album.

Conrad tried to ease away from the edge of the desk, but his muscles froze. "What is it?"

"Her detail." Russell stood up from his seat and turned to Conrad. His hands found his hips, and his shoulders rose with his breath. "Apparently she's already collected her things and made it out the door. Though reception there ranges from spotty to non-existent, so God knows when that was sent." He gestured towards the cell phone, and his gaze followed the sweep of his hand. "She could be—"

He gave a double take and stopped. His gaze fixed on the photo album and his frown returned twice as deep as before. He stooped over the album, spun it around, and jabbed a finger at the photograph in the bottom right-hand corner. He twisted around and looked up at Conrad. "Is that Bess?"

The tension released, as though a set of strings had been drawn as tight as they could be, only for the interruption to sever them in a single breath.

Conrad let out a huff as a soft smile came to his lips, and then he pushed himself away from the desk, whilst Russell lifted the album and balanced it open in his palm. "Yes. And that's Lydia and Harrison, and that there is your intern."

"Geez. You can see why people say Stevie looks just like her."

The photograph must have been taken when Stevie was perhaps two months old, Harrison six or seven months. Elizabeth rested back against the cushions of the couch, baby Stevie lying lengthways in her lap with her fists flailing at her sides, whilst Harrison was half sat, half propped in a tripod between Elizabeth and Lydia, peering down at Stevie with wide-eyed fascination. The women had been chatting to one another and they were engrossed in their children, so much so that they had failed to notice the camera poised to capture that scene, but half a second before the flash, Elizabeth had glanced up, and though the deep bags beneath her eyes spoke of her lack of sleep, a smile lit up her face in that single snap of awareness, so candid and pure, the type of smile that not even the most skilled of operatives could fake.

Conrad took the album from Russell, and stared down at the picture. "I was trying to convince myself that I have had some kind of positive impact on her, that despite everything I was right to approach her that day. I suppose the bad outweighs the good right now, even more so if she's decided to leave. But she looks happy there. And it might not seem a lot, but it means something. It makes me feel that maybe I did help, in some small way."

* * *

**Elizabeth**

**1994**

The door to the office was ajar, but Elizabeth rapped the mid-joint of her forefinger against it first—three sharp taps—before she clutched the chill chrome handle, eased it open further and leant into the doorway whilst she steadied herself against the frame. "Conrad…" She waited for him to look up from the files strewn across his desk. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes, Bess." He flipped shut the covers on the manila files, and then gestured to the chairs opposite. "Come in, take a seat."

Elizabeth guided the door shut behind her with a soft click, and then perched awkwardly on one of the thin-cushioned chairs in front of the desk. Conrad eyed her, and the queasy feeling that already swirled at the pit of her stomach leached out and trickled its clamminess through her veins. She smoothed her palms down against her slacks and rid them of the film of sweat that had taken hold, and unable to meet his gaze, she turned her head from side to side and set her ponytail swaying. "Sir, if this is about earlier…"

Conrad leant forward in his office chair, and he clasped his hands atop the fan of beige and blush pink files—all stamped in red ink: Classified. "Elizabeth, that's the fourth meeting you've ducked out of this week. And it hasn't gone unnoticed." He motioned towards the door. "The higher-ups were going to have a word with you, but I told them that I'd handle it."

"I apologise, sir." She continued to shake her head, whilst the queasiness roiled—the smell of coffee that rose up from the cup on his desk only made it worse. "I know it's unprofessional, and I promise you it won't happen again."

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that."

She stopped and looked up at him. "Sir?"

His expression had softened, and his eyes glinted. "If I'm right—which I suspect I am—then I'd say it's going to be happening for at least another ten to twelve weeks."

And with the way that her stomach dropped, she might have to run out again in less than a minute. In her mind, she mapped out the quickest route to the ladies', or the nearest supply closet with a bin, or just an empty cardboard box—if the past few days were anything to go by, she couldn't afford to be picky.

But then the feeling eased, and she let out a huff of a laugh, a mixture of self-derision and relief. "You know, I probably shouldn't be surprised that you figured it out, given that you're a spy and all. In fact, I should probably be more surprised that it isn't already all over Langley."

"Well, I have to confess, I had a jump on the intel."

Elizabeth's brow gathered in a light frown—_What did he mean?_

A soft smile played on his lips, and in front of him, his hands parted and then came back together again. "Lydia's now safely into the second trimester, so I'm used to all the signs."

"Congratulations! I didn't know you two were expecting."

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "Well, I'm not rushing out of meetings at precisely eleven o'clock each morning."

She conceded that with a sheepish smile and a half-nod. "True."

He gestured towards her. "And congratulations to you and Henry. I imagine he'll be excited to be starting a family, especially after returning from active duty."

Elizabeth held to her silence, whilst her gaze faltered and then dipped away.

"Bess?" A touch of concern graced Conrad's voice.

"Actually…" Her shoulders raised, and she waited for the tension to release. But it didn't. It bound her the same way it had done for the past few weeks. Unrelenting, ever-building, until it felt like something inside her would snap. She met Conrad's eye with a wince. "I haven't told Henry."

Conrad's eyebrows arched, and he drew back from the desk, his elbows coming to rest against the leather arms of his chair as he leant back in the seat. "I see."

She quickly slid forward to the front edge of her seat, one hand raised to stop whatever track of thought she had just forced him down. "It's not like that. It's definitely his, and we were definitely, _definitely_ trying, believe me—"

His eyebrows arched even higher, his own warning signal for her to stop before she felt the need to elaborate that point.

Her hand fell back to her lap, and she rested her gaze on the desk in front of her as though one of those classified documents might hold the answer to why she was feeling the way that she was feeling. Her lips tugged at one corner. "I guess I just never thought it would happen so quickly."

"Well, I hate to tell you, Bess, but even a first-class spy like yourself won't be able to hide this from him for long. Morning sickness is only the beginning."

"I know, and I'm going to tell him. I keep meaning to tell him. It's just…when I do tell him, he's going to be so, so _happy_." She could already picture the expression on Henry's face when she broke the news—unadulterated joy. But the thought tugged at her heart in all the wrong ways, until it sank into a mire of guilt, where the only thing that was clear was this: she was going to ruin it for him. She looked up at Conrad, who had been studying her in silence. "And I want to be happy with him. But right now, I'm…" She shook her head, as the words failed to form.

"Overwhelmed?"

"Yes." The word escaped her in a rush, a moment of release, and she held her hand out, her fingers splayed. "Overwhelmed, terrified, lost, panicking. Any of them will suffice." She clutched the arm of her chair, the wood cool beneath her palm. "I just don't know if I can do this, if I can be someone's mother. I mean, I've never even been around a baby, not since I was practically a baby myself, and the only experience I have of looking after someone is my brother, but we were both teenagers, so that doesn't really count." She gestured to her stomach, still as flat as before. "But soon I'm going to have this tiny human being who's totally dependent on me, and I don't know what I'm meant to do with it, how I'm even meant to keep it alive, let alone how to make it thrive, and it's not like—" She stopped as a surge slammed into her chest.

She took a breath, but everything squeezed too tight, as though it were trying to stop her from saying the words that she had been intending to say, the words that had sprung to her tongue without her even realising.

Her gaze dipped to the ground. She shook her head, and then steeled herself and forced herself to meet Conrad's eye. The words came out bitter and flat, the only way she could make them palatable. "It's not like I can ask my own mother to help me."

The silence ached. It echoed with all the loss and emptiness she had been suppressing.

"Bess…" Conrad began.

But she shook her head again, firmer this time. They were not going down that path. There was nothing worse than pity. "I want to tell Henry, but if I do that right now, then all that's going to come out and it'll take over, and I'm scared that I'm going to ruin it for him. So, I just need to take some time and get my head around it first, and then when I can at least feel a little bit excited or happy, then I can tell him."

Conrad studied her for a moment longer. A deep frown furrowed his brow, whilst he rested his face in the L between forefinger and thumb, his second finger touched to his lips. "You know, the prospect of becoming a parent can be pretty daunting for anyone. Fortunately, nature gives us nine months to prepare, but even with all the time in the world I don't think we can ever say we're truly ready. And then by the time we've mastered looking after babies, they'll have turned into kindergarteners, and then by the time we've got the hang of that, they'll be hurtling towards their teens."

"So, basically, I'm screwed?"

Conrad flashed her a smile, whilst a low huff of a laugh escaped him. Then his expression sobered again. "I can't say that I face the same difficulties that you do, Bess, but I know that when Lydia first told me, I didn't feel ready to be a father, I still don't, but I'm getting there, slowly, because the truth is it's not something you become overnight, it's something you grow into, day by day. And sometimes thinking about where we need to end up can be paralysing; instead we just need to focus on the next step ahead of us, and know that if we keep doing that, we'll find our way through, and we'll get to where we need to be in the end."

When he spoke, he made it sound so simple, almost enough to ease the churning of worry that accompanied each lick of nausea. Elizabeth twisted her wedding band back and forth as she pictured Henry's reaction again. Perhaps it was enough for just him to be happy now, happy enough for the both of them—no, the three of them—until her own happiness came. Her fingers stilled, and she looked up at Conrad. "I just need to tell him, don't I?"

He nodded. "That's the first step. And I'm sure he'll be thrilled, but I'm also sure he'll have fears of his own too, and you being honest about your struggles isn't going to ruin it for him."

"And the second step?"

"Tell HR."

She smiled. "And the next?"

"You'll figure it out when you get to it. Trust the process, Bess. And don't be afraid to lean on others. Here—" He pulled himself up to the desk and scribbled something down on a piece of paper torn from his notepad. He held it out to her. A phone number. "Lydia will give you all the intel."

Elizabeth clutched the piece of paper in both hands. "Thank you, Conrad."

"You're welcome."

She was about to push herself up from her seat, when—

"You should take these too." He tugged open the bottom drawer of his desk, and then placed an orange box on top of the files and pushed it towards her. The sheen of the cardboard gleamed with the soft spring light that filtered in through the windows.

Elizabeth frowned. "Ginger snaps?"

"For the morning sickness. Lydia swears by them. Got me hooked too." He patted his stomach, his eyebrows raised. "Though I could do with cutting back."

She picked up the box, and the scent of ginger and cinnamon and nutmeg wafted up and lilted through her, warm and soothing. "Thank you."

"One step at a time, Bess, one step at a time."

* * *

**Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed this chapter. : )**

**Elizabeth's POV tomorrow?**


	50. Chapter Forty-Eight: pink

**Chapter Forty-Eight**

**…****pink.**

**Elizabeth**

**11:29 AM**

"How are you feeling?" Dr Sherman eased herself down onto the concrete ledge next to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth hunched forward, the toes of her sneakers pressed into the gravel, her heels slightly raised so that, without her laces, the backs of her shoes fell away and the cool air rushed around her bare soles. She took a sip of coffee, and then returned to cradling the mug between her knees. "Like I've been hit by a truck."

"I meant: How are you feeling emotionally?"

"Oh." Elizabeth twisted around to face Dr Sherman, and she let her gaze flick up and down for a drawn out second before—"Like I wish I'd been hit by a truck."

Dr Sherman closed her eyes and shook her head to herself; with the quirk at the corner of her lips, it looked as though she were stifling a smile.

Elizabeth turned back to the car park. "Humiliated."

"These things happen."

She snorted—_Really?_

"What else?"

She swallowed a gulp of coffee. "Mortified."

"That's more of a synonym."

"Yeah, well, humiliated didn't quite cut it." She paused for a moment. What did she feel? What hadn't been swallowed by the hollow at the centre of her chest? What hid beneath all that was loud and angry and primary? "I feel…lost."

"Lost?" A frown worked its way into Dr Sherman's voice. "How so?"

"Like I don't really know who 'me' is anymore."

"Why don't you tell me about that."

Elizabeth set her coffee cup down on the concrete slab with a muffled clunk, and picked up the bowl of oatmeal. She cradled the bowl in one palm, and raked the dessert spoon through the mottled pink oats. Most of its warmth had gone—had leached out into the ground below—and the creamy sweet aroma tugged at her in a way that was more cloying than appetising; though, that was hardly surprising given that she hadn't felt the coaxing gnarl of hunger in weeks. The oatmeal served more as a distraction really. Or perhaps a reminder. A prompt…

Pink. That's how she was feeling.

She cleared her throat, and then swallowed. "When Stevie was turning six, she wanted a princess party. I had always promised myself that I wouldn't limit my kids by forcing them into gender stereotypes, but Stevie…" She drew in a breath so deep that it ached through her lungs and spread through her ribs. "Stevie did ballet, she dressed up as a princess, she wanted me to paint her nails and braid her hair, she liked Polly Pocket and My Little Pony. There was no escaping it. She was a girly girl. And I'm telling you, the girl loved pink." The breath escaped in a sharp sigh. "So a princess party it was.

"We hired a hall and we turned it into a veritable unicorn's nest of pink. There were pink balloons, pink bunting, pink streamers, pink cotton candy, pink marshmallows on pretty much everything, and fairy cakes smothered in pink frosting.

"You would not _believe_ the smile on Stevie's face when she saw it. She was so happy. And seeing her that happy, I ought to have been happy too, but instead I felt this knot twisting up the pit of my stomach. It grew tighter and tighter, and by the end of the afternoon I was exhausted and my whole face ached from forcing a smile to hide what I was feeling.

"I couldn't sleep that night. I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to figure out why I felt so…wound up. Of course, Henry said that I was obsessing and that I should just forget about it. Fortunately for him he stopped short of calling me hormonal; if he had, I can't say I wouldn't have at least maimed him. But no matter what he said, I couldn't let it go. I kept turning that feeling over and over in my mind. I examined every aspect of the day, trying to figure out at precisely what point it had started and what it was that had made me feel that way.

"It must have been two or three days later when it hit me, out of nowhere—or so it seemed. Lacrosse. I used to have lacrosse practice on Friday evenings when I was in high school, and my mother would always meet me afterwards and take me for ice cream. It was the only time I got to spend alone with her, just the two of us, the only time when I felt as important or as valued as Will. She would always have mint chocolate chip, and I would always have strawberry.

"That's what had been bothering me. All that pink was the exact shade of the strawberry ice cream, and on some level it must have reminded me of my mother, and how that time we spent together each Friday made me feel cherished and happy. But of course, it also reminded me of the strawberry milkshake I had asked for before the crash and why she wasn't at the party; it reminded me that she never got to see me get married or have children of my own, let alone be there herself for Stevie's sixth birthday. It was like the pink triggered that association subconsciously, so deep down I was thinking about what I had lost, rather than being able to enjoy seeing Stevie being happy.

"And it bugged me that something in my mind, something I couldn't even recognise until days later, could ruin what should have been a special day for me. We all live with these ghosts of memories, but most of the time we don't even realise that they're there, that they're the reason why we feel what we feel, the reason why we do what we do."

She shook her head to herself. "Last night, I honestly thought I could walk out that door. That I could just leave. After all, there was nothing there to stop me…" The corner of her lips flinched. "Well, nothing except for my own memories." Her tone hardened, and a pinch gripped the middle of her brow. "And if we're so governed by memories, then maybe free will is just an illusion. I mean, do I make my own decisions, or are they already decided for me by whatever's going on subconsciously? And if that's the case, then who am 'I'? And if I can't even walk one step out of the door without something hidden in my mind stopping me, then what does it really mean to be 'me'?"

She stopped raking the spoon through the oatmeal and twisted around to face Dr Sherman, whose gaze had been prickling against her all that time, as subtle as the sting in the breeze.

For a moment, Dr Sherman just stared at Elizabeth, as though perhaps that wasn't her clients' standard response when asked, 'How are you feeling?'. Then she arched her eyebrows, and her lips curved. "That's a pretty big question."

"Don't worry." Elizabeth shook her head, and as she dipped her chin, her hair fell forward in a veil between them. "I'm not expecting an answer."

She scooped up a spoonful of oatmeal, raised it to her lips, considered it, and then placed it down again. She swapped the bowl for her coffee. In the centre of the car park, thrushes flitted from branch to branch in the black walnut tree and filled the air with their swooping whistles, whilst in the SUV, the DS agents stared down the track as their mouths moved silently.

"Well, it's true that we're all governed by our memories to a certain extent," Dr Sherman said, "they're there to inform us and to help us make our decisions, but as you said, they can also cloud our actions and our feelings. And while I would never claim that I can take your experience of this event away from you, what we can do is to bring these memories into balance, so that they hold no more power over you than others do."

Elizabeth sipped on her coffee. "But that means talking about what happened."

"It does. But, as I said, I can talk you through the report."

"And as I said, that won't be necessary."

"Elizabeth…" Dr Sherman's voice acquired an edge. "You say that free will is just an illusion, but here you have a choice, one to make of your own accord. You can choose to work through this and to take control, to get your life back, to return to the work you love—if that's what you want. Or you can keep trying to push this down, but know that it will crop up again and again, or you'll be forced to make your world smaller and smaller, and that will take away any sense of agency."

"Nice sales pitch, but I already made my decision last night."

Dr Sherman rubbed her brow, and then let her hand fall back to her lap. "I know you feel you need to be there for your brother, but he has plenty of people around him."

Elizabeth shook her head. "What I feel is that I should've been there when he woke up, that I should've fought for him to get that treatment, that I should never have given up on him."

"And leaving now won't change the way you feel about what's happened."

"You're right, it won't."

"I'd like you to at least consider continuing with outpatient therapy."

"I'm not going to do outpatient therapy—"

"Elizabeth—"

"Not yet anyway."

A pause.

Elizabeth turned to Dr Sherman. Dr Sherman's lips were parted, her brow pinched, and her gaze scanned back and forth over Elizabeth's expression, as though she were searching for a single pore that she could prise open and reveal what Elizabeth was thinking.

"As I said, I made my decision last night." Elizabeth shrugged. "I'm not leaving."

Dr Sherman's frown deepened. "You're not?"

"I haven't bothered to lace up my shoes, have I?" Elizabeth gestured to the slack-tongued sneakers that allowed pockets of crisp air to gather around her bare soles and tingle at her toes, whilst their laces still hid along with her coat belt in the side pocket of the bag behind her.

She took a long sip of coffee, and then returned the mug to its cradle between her knees. "The only reason I'm sitting out here is because I had to prove myself that I could do it, so that I didn't fear that the next time I tried to walk through those doors I'd have a panic attack, and so I knew that my decision to stay wasn't out of fear of leaving. Plus, this is probably the first time in the last month that I've actually been outside in the sunshine."

"And your bag?"

She shrugged again. "Henry only packed about a week's worth of clothes—perhaps a little optimistically—so if I'm going to be staying here, I'll need to do some laundry."

"I see," Dr Sherman said slowly. Then her lips quirked into a kind of bemused smile. "You like to surprise people, don't you?"

"I find it's generally best to keep people guessing."

She gave a huff of a laugh, or perhaps of relief. "So, what made you change your mind about therapy?"

Elizabeth stared down into her coffee; its surface reflected the sunlight overhead, a pool of light amidst the ring of deep brown. "When I saw myself last night, in the mirrors in the foyer, I didn't recognise myself at first, but then it dawned on me: that person last night, that wasn't me, but it's who I'll become if I don't do something now." She shook her head, and with her chin dipped, the ends of her hair swayed against her cheeks. "And maybe it's already too late, maybe therapy will never take me where I want to be, but I've got to at least try."

"And where do you want to be?"

Elizabeth nodded towards the SUV across the car park, its bodywork touched by the reflection of the black walnut tree. "I want to be able to get into that car without panicking, I want to be able to go home and be present with my family, I want to be able to feel something more than emptiness at best…" The hollow inside tugged at her, as though the feelings it had swallowed were trying to claw their way out. But they made it no more than halfway, snatching just a glimpse of light, before they slipped back down into the darkness. "I want to help capture who did this to my family."

"The first three I can help with, but the last one…"

Elizabeth turned to Dr Sherman. Her gaze sharpened and her eyes narrowed. "I remember everything that happened that day. Vividly." The word hung between them with all the heft of an A-bomb. Seconds passed, and then the weight began to press down on her chest, until it felt as though if she let the pause linger any longer, her breath might stop. She looked away again. "It's like my mind knew exactly what was going to happen that day, and it hired a photographer to capture every last moment in excruciating detail. And, I don't know, maybe there is something in there that can help the investigation. But if I let myself think about it, then I start talking myself through what happened and examining every element of that day, and I get so wrapped up in it that I lose track of time and I forget where I am, until I'm not really here but I'm not really there either. And then it takes over, and I start panicking." Her grip on the mug tightened. "It's like dipping your toe into a river, being caught by the current and being dragged out to sea."

"So, you chose not to dip your toe altogether?"

"Exactly." She gave a curt nod. "I'd rather lie to the FBI, to you, to Russell…to Henry… And it worked for a while, or at least it felt like it worked. But do you have any idea how exhausting it is trying not to think about something, and not only that, but trying not to think of things that remind you of the something, or things that remind you of the things that remind you of the something?"

"No, but I can imagine."

"Whatever you're imagining, it's not even close." This time, when Elizabeth took a swig of coffee, its bitterness crawled down the back of her throat and drew out a grimace. "And that's before you add in all the guilt and anger and pain… It leaves room for nothing else."

Crows hopped amidst the litter of yellow leaves beneath the black walnut tree. They stopped occasionally to pluck and root at the ground, or to let out a throaty _caw-caw-caw_ that ricocheted into the air, bounced across the car park and echoed off the clinic building.

"And have you been feeling panicked?" Dr Sherman's gaze continued to bristle at Elizabeth's cheek.

Elizabeth nodded. "Nights are the worst. I can use the grounding techniques during the day, but at night… You just wake up in a panic, and then you're flailing."

"Is that why you didn't want to sleep?"

"Partly."

"Then why didn't you reach out?"

Elizabeth placed the half-empty mug down next to her on the concrete, and then smoothed her palms along the rough rasp of her jeans and clutched her knees. She took a breath, her shoulders lifting. And then the breath escaped her in a rush, and her reply tumbled out with it. "Because then I'd have to think about it. And if I thought about it, I would panic, and if I let myself panic then it would get worse, and before I knew it, I'd be back to where I was after Iran. But if I could just push through, push back those thoughts, keep the panic at bay, then maybe I could cope, and then Will would get better, and it would all just disappear."

In the lull, the breeze whispered through the paper birch trees. Its susurration strummed at the edge of Elizabeth's mind, as though it were calling to her, and if she were to let it, even that would carry her away; back to the images, the sounds, the smells; back to the panic, the terror, the feeling that death was a certainty; back to the guilt, the grief, the belief that either she would cope, or she wouldn't, in which case death would be a relief.

Her voice faded to a murmur. "But things got worse anyway."

She paused, and then a frown unfurled across her brow. She looked to Dr Sherman. "I'm going to have to fill out all those intake forms again, aren't I?"

Dr Sherman chuckled. "I'm afraid so."

"God, I hate paperwork." Elizabeth pushed herself up to standing, and stumbled slightly as her sneakers slipped through the gravel. She turned back to face Dr Sherman, and hugged the fronts of her woollen coat around her. "On the forms…do I have to list a second contact?"

Dr Sherman eased herself up from the perch too, and dusted down her hands. "If you don't want Russell checking in on you anymore, you can withdraw your consent to share information with him, or you could always list your daughter instead."

Elizabeth shook her head. "Russell can do what he wants. No…" She stilled and met Dr Sherman's gaze. "I meant Henry."

"I see," Dr Sherman said, but the way her brow bunched said that she didn't see at all. "Well, we won't share information with him, if that's what you want… But you're not doing this to punish him for saying he'd rather you stay here, are you?"

"I have to admit that pissed me off." Elizabeth stooped down and picked up the mug and bowl, and then grasped hold of the straps of her bag too. "But, no. If I wanted to punish him, I'd go home as I am right now and tell him to deal with it." Her whole body ached as she straightened up again. "Sarah mentioned he's been calling every morning and evening. If I were doing that, he'd tell me I was obsessing."

"Well, we can't stop him from calling, or worrying—"

"But you can stop enabling him. If you keep dripping feeding him information, all he's going to be thinking about is that next hit, and it's just going to make him worry even more." She looked down at the fingers that clasped the leather straps of her bag, and in that clear light, her rings gleamed as though they held embers that were fighting not to die out. "Right now, love feels like…like…I don't know, like it's just not there, and maybe it never even existed at all, but I know that I love him and our kids, and I'd rather he just focus on himself and them instead of tormenting himself over what's going on with me."

Dr Sherman offered her a soft smile, perhaps a little pitying, but there was a spark of recognition there too. She nodded. "I'll have a word with him."

"Thank you."

Dr Sherman bent down, lifted her handbag from the concrete, and pulled the straps up onto her shoulder. "So, when do you want to begin?"

"Well, my schedule's pretty hectic at the moment…" Elizabeth said, and then she mustered the wisp of a smile. "How about right now?"

* * *

The cushions of the couch in the therapy room deflated around Elizabeth as she leant back into their embrace. With the sunlight that filtered through the cream-coloured blinds, the room buzzed with a soft yellow haze, warmed by the aroma of coffee that drifted up from the mugs on the coffee table, but more so by the punch of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon that escaped the open box at her side.

Dr Sherman sat in the armchair opposite, her hands folded atop the navy blue notebook in her lap, a biro clasped between them. "So, tell me about that day."

Elizabeth stared down at the ginger biscuit that she worried between her fingers, its edges rough and sticky and beginning to sweat beneath her touch. She hadn't lied when she had told Sarah she didn't know where she would go next; she could only hope that this path would lead her back home. And maybe it wouldn't, maybe she'd just head around and around in circles into a tightening spiral of lost. But sometimes you had to trust that if you keep taking it one step at a time, eventually, in the end, you'll get to where you need to be.

She raised the biscuit to her lips, paused, and then snapped off a bite. The taste flooded her mouth, and for a moment, it felt as though she were buoyed on the eddies of memories, of every time that same blend of sugar and spice had lifted her and comforted her before.

The morsel melted away on her tongue, and she looked up at Dr Sherman. "I had arranged to meet Will for lunch. It was only meant to take an hour or so, and then I'd head straight back to the office, but then it started to rain…"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Thoughts are appreciated. : )**


	51. Chapter Forty-Nine: the chain of comm

**Chapter Forty-Nine**

**…****the chain of command.**

**Matt**

**Wednesday, 28th November, 2018**

**12:13 PM**

Matt hooked the teabag out of the mug using the teaspoon and then catapulted it across the break room and towards the bin in the corner. It arced through the air, hit the grey plastic swing lid with a wet slap, causing the lid to lurch open, and then it slid down, dragging a little as it did so, and disappeared into the awaiting trash before the lid teetered shut once more.

"Nice shot." Kat's voice came from the doorway.

Matt spun around. Kat stood in the entrance, next to the trophy cabinet, with her hands tucked into the pockets of her suit pants whilst her expression showed a mix of surprise and genuine appreciation of the talent. He grinned. "You know, it's surprising the skills you pick up when you're meant to be writing a novel."

She smiled back, and then jerked her head towards the corridor behind her. "You got a minute?"

"Sure." He slurped from the top of the mug and lowered the surface level just enough that the tea wouldn't spill over when he walked, and then he followed her out onto the hallway that ran adjacent to the glass-walled offices and that led towards the secretary's office—still empty, untouched since the day of the poisoning. At least Cushing hadn't taken over that, even if he saw everything else as fair game.

In the main hall, members of staff wrestled on overcoats and chunky-knit scarves, leant over the desks to answer the trills of an abandoned telephone, or tapped away at the computer keyboard one-handedly whilst the other hand delivered sips from takeaway coffee cups or bites of wilted sandwiches to their lips. The usual lunchtime bustle.

Kat's behaviour, however, was anything but usual.

She peered through the slats of the blinds that shielded Jay's office, her brow nicked with an anxious frown that grew more and more engrained by the millisecond, and at the sight of Jay hunched over his desk, the handset of the office phone pressed to his ear, her pace quickened a fraction. She glanced back over her shoulder, as though to make sure that Matt was keeping up—or hadn't fallen into an abyss—and then she tilted her head towards her own office, her frown like a nudge that urged him on.

She held the door open for him, ushered him inside, and motioned for him to take a seat.

"What was that all about?" Matt sank down onto one of the chairs in front of the desk. He leant back against the thin cushion and rested one leg across the other, the mug of tea cradled loosely in front of his chest. But as Kat perched against the edge of the desk, his easy smile was met with an almost pained expression, one that made his smile sink beneath a wave of unease.

Kat spoke in a low voice, as though worried someone might hear them through the glass, her whole body tensed as she clutched the edge of the wood. "I reached out to my Russian counterparts about the BSR deal, but I didn't want to gut the secretary's proposal like Cushing asked for, so I softened the terms as little as possible. But it didn't exactly go as planned."

"Let me guess, they want to get rid of the clauses all together."

Kat nodded. The whites of her eyes shone. "And they're refusing to budge."

Matt lowered his foot to the floor, and then hunched forward in the seat, the mug clasped between his knees. He looked up at her. "Well, we always knew that might happen."

"I thought that if I gave them five per cent, maybe they'd ask for ten, then we could meet them in the middle, and it would save us from losing the whole thing. That's how it's meant to work, after all." Kat stared out through the frosted glass partition. Her eyes took on the same hazy tint, and as her gaze lingered there, she shook her head to herself. "But they know something's up with the secretary, and they know that we have no power to negotiate, not when Cushing's got about as much spine as a sea sponge."

Matt nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "So, what do you want to do?"

"Normally, I'd take it to the secretary, but that's no longer an option, and I'm worried if I go back to Jay, then he'll just side with Cushing…" Her gaze sharpened on Matt, and her nose wrinkled. "What's up with him anyway?"

"Who? Jay?"

Kat nodded.

"He's processing."

Her eyebrows arched. "_Processing_ like the secretary was _processing_, or…"

"He just needs a little time."

"But if I took the offer to him now, do you think he'd sink the deal?"

"Honestly?" Matt's shoulders raised. He'd like to think that their conversation the week before would have had an effect, that Jay would at least consider backing the secretary, but they hadn't spoken about it in the six or so days since, and Jay had made no sign of changing his stance, not yet anyway. His shoulders fell as he shook his head. "I don't know."

"Well, I can probably keep it quiet for a couple of days, but given all the pressure we're getting from the White House, Cushing's going to start asking for an update."

"So, maybe we need to get them to take the pressure off."

"You mean go to Russell Jackson?"

Matt shrugged. "It's an option."

"Well, I can honestly say I'd rather listen to Desi playing Baby Shark on loop until my ears bleed than speak to Russell Jackson… And I'm pretty sure the feeling's mutual."

"But if it saves MSec's deal?"

Kat paused for a moment, and then let out a stream of a sigh. She pushed herself away from the edge of the desk. "Grab your coat. If I have to deal with him, then you're coming with me."

* * *

"Hey, Stevie." Kat offered Stevie a warm smile as she stepped through into the outer part of Russell Jackson's office, Matt just a pace behind. The sunlight flooded through the vertical blinds on the opposite side of the room; it added a hazy quality to the air and heightened the fug of the radiators.

Stevie turned to them as she tied a knot in the belt of her pewter grey trench coat. She cast them a wary look, one that flitted from Kat to Matt and then back again, as though she were trying to size up their intent, before she offered a cautious—"Hey…"—in reply.

"How's your uncle doing?" Matt stood with his hands tucked into the pockets of his woollen overcoat, his fingertips still stinging from the chill outside. "I stopped by the hospital the other day but he still seemed a bit groggy."

"He's good." Stevie hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder. Her cell phone bleeped, and she stared down at the screen. "I was just on my way there now."

"And your mom?"

She shook her head and gave a kind of snort. "Who knows." She tucked her cell phone into her pocket and strode towards the door. When she stepped out into the corridor, she spun to face them and flashed them a taut smile along with a stilted shrug as she paced backwards. "But I'm fine, thanks for asking."

With that, she turned and stalked away.

Matt pivoted to Kat. "What did I say?"

"I wouldn't take it personally." Russell pulled open the door to the main office and gestured for them to join him inside. "She's a bit sensitive when it comes to her mother." He strode towards his desk, but slowed for a moment to cast a look over his shoulder at Kat. "But so long as she don't take it out on the furniture, I guess I can let it slide."

"Nice." Kat forced an empty smile, whilst the look in her eyes said that, just possibly, she was running through a mental catalogue of furniture and selecting which item she'd most like to throw at Russell. Something heavy. "I was wondering how long it would take for you to mention that."

Matt stopped behind one of the armchairs that faced Russell's desk, and rested his hands atop the back, his fingertips brushing against the cool leather. "How is the secretary?"

"Rocky start." Russell pulled his office chair up to the edge of the desk so that the wheels trundled across the carpet, and returning to his lunch, he stabbed a shred of iceberg lettuce with his fork. The tines screeched across the plate. "But she's finally applying herself. Better late than never, I suppose." He chewed over the bite, and a touch of distaste pinched his face as though the lettuce were particularly astringent. Then he looked up at them. "If this is about sending her those Korean red bean things—"

"Hodu-gwaja."

He frowned. "What?"

"Hodu-gwaja."

"Right…" He shook his head, his eyebrows raised, and then returned to the salad. "Well, whatever. I haven't gotten round to it yet."

"Blake'll take care of it, if you'd just pass on the address."

"I'm not telling you where she is."

Matt wrinkled his nose and drew his chin back. "Why not?"

"Do I really have to explain it to you?" Russell stopped and stared up at Matt, his fork poised over the plate. From the look he gave him, it was hard to tell whether the question was rhetorical or not. "For whatever reason, utterly deluded or rational in their own way, someone wants her dead. Right now, that someone doesn't know where she is, and until that someone is in custody, I intend on keeping it that way."

"It's not like we're planning on sending out a memo."

"You'd be surprised how easily these things get out." He chased a cherry tomato around the plate, speared it, and stuffed it into his mouth. The same look of distaste spread across his face once more. He pushed the rest of the salad away and snatched up the bottle of water that stood in the middle of the desk, and leaning back in his seat, he twisted off the cap. "Now, assuming you didn't come all the way here to talk about baked goods, what's this about?"

"The deal with Russia over the BSR." With one hand rested against the back of the adjacent armchair, Kat squeezed through the gap between the two seats and leant towards the desk. She held out a stone blue manila file for Russell to take.

Russell rested the file in his lap and he flicked through the pages. "What am I looking at?"

"All the clauses the Russians want us to take out if they're going to agree to the deal."

"And I need to see this because…?"

"Because this isn't the deal that the secretary fought for, but it's the deal we'll end up with if Cushing doesn't give us any room to negotiate."

Matt nodded, and then turned from Kat to Russell. "He won't even consider the possibility of offering inducements, or walking away if the deal isn't right."

Russell passed the file back to Kat. "So, you thought you'd go behind his back?" The silence stretched, and his gaze flitted back and forth between them as he sipped from the bottle of water. "I know that, for whatever reason, you feel a sense of loyalty to Secretary McCord—"

Kat shook her head. "This isn't about loyalty. It's about doing what's right, not only for the environment and for the region, but for State." She pushed through the gap between the chairs and took a seat, perching at the edge of the cushion. "The Russians might not have liked these clauses, but they were willing to sign before. Now they're just trying to exploit the fact that the secretary's on leave, and if we let them, not only is it a bad deal, but it makes State look weak and it risks setting a precedent for all the other deals we're currently negotiating."

"One could argue that offering up incentives will do just the same." Russell held his hands out wide and shrugged. "Just wait until other countries get a whiff of all the nice, juicy inducements you gave the Russians in order to get them to sign. You really think the others won't hold out for a taste?"

Kat twisted around and looked up at Matt. Her eyes widened a fraction in a silent plea for back up.

But Russell was right, either way, whether they gutted the deal or took extreme measures to persuade the Russians to sign, it would spill blood into the water and risk the other negotiations already in place.

"The president's priority is keeping peace in the region." Russell dragged himself up to the edge of the desk. "I know that Secretary McCord was keen to tie in these environmental measures, and POTUS was willing to let her, but not at the expense of the underlying deal." He lifted a file from the top of the stack and pulled it towards him, and then leant forward and snatched up a pen from the pot at the front of the desk. "Either figure out a way to make it work, or else the deal will have to go through as it stands."

"But in order to figure something out, we need more time," Matt said. "Acting Secretary Cushing's keen to get this deal signed off as soon as possible, and he's not going to give us a chance to make it work when he's feeling pressure from the White House."

Kat pushed herself up from the seat, and added in a mutter, "Though if we can't offer any inducements, then I don't see a way of salvaging this deal." She edged through the gap between the chairs and brushed past Matt. "What we need is for the secretary to lean on Avdonin; that's probably the only thing that will get them to budge."

Kat strode away towards the door, but Matt stayed where he was, gripping the back of the armchair whilst Russell frowned down at the page in front of him. "Is there any way the secretary could call Minister Avdonin?" Matt said. "They have a rapport—"

"The secretary is meant to be focusing on getting her head together, and right now, she doesn't need any distractions." Russell kept his gaze on the file. "If she keeps up the work, she could be signed off within a couple of weeks." He placed the pen down, and looked up at Matt. "If you can't figure out a way to make it work without her, then I suggest you figure out a way to stall the Russians and Cushing, and you won't hear anything about it from our end."

Matt glanced back at Kat, and was met with a hint of smile to mirror his own. He turned back to Russell. "We can work with that."

"But if the Russians show any sign of walking, then you're to close the deal." Russell stared at him, hard, as though trying to etch the message into his mind. "Do you understand?"

* * *

The elevator swooped up floor by floor. It paused at each level with a lurch and a _ding_ before the doors rattled open and members of the State Department staff filtered on and off. Matt and Kat leant against the wooden paneling at the back, both with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their overcoats. The scent of the crisp fall air outside was slowly lost to the claustrophobic warmth of the elevator, along with the aroma of coffee that drifted through the lids of takeaway cups and the oil-rich smell of fried food that spilled out from the cartons that people carried back to the office in sheer white plastic bags.

"So," Kat said as the doors shut and left them alone in the elevator, "all we've got to do is find a way to stall the Russians—"

Matt cast her a sideways glance. "One that doesn't lead to them backing out."

"And keep it quiet from Cushing—"

"So he doesn't go ahead and make the deal as it stands."

"And keep it quiet from Jay—"

"So he doesn't find out we went behind his back, or take the deal to Cushing."

"And keep the charade going for at least a couple of weeks—"

"Or however long it is until the secretary comes back."

"All without developing a nervous tic."

"Easy." Matt smiled.

Kat gave a nod, though her own smile was more of a grimace. "Right."

_Ding_. The doors trundled open on the seventh floor.

Matt's expression fell. "Or not."

Jay was hovering by the phone lockers opposite the elevators, his arms folded across his chest whilst a heavy frown creased his brow. His gaze locked on Kat. "How is it that Blake knows you've heard back from the Russians, yet that's the first I've heard of it?"

Kat leant towards Matt and spoke out of the corner of her lips. "Remind me to punch Blake."

"With pleasure," Matt muttered.

Jay tilted his head towards the corridor. "My office. Now."

* * *

The glass door to Jay's office swung shut behind them and deadened the chatter outside. Jay motioned for Matt and Kat to take a seat whilst he leant back against the edge of his desk. "You should've come to me straight away, not gone circumventing the chain of command by running to Russell Jackson."

Matt perched on the chair, one arm propped against the armrest, the wood biting into his elbow. "We wouldn't have to go to Russell Jackson if we thought you'd give the secretary's deal a fair shot."

"It had a shot, and the Russians rejected it." Jay held up one hand and cut off Matt before he had a chance to protest. "You can't keep treating this like some kind of symbol."

"Then don't think of it as a symbol." Matt motioned for Kat to hand Jay the manila folder that rested in her lap. "Just look at the facts. These are all the clauses that the Russians want to strip out. Tell me, is that a good deal or not?"

Jay placed the file on the desk behind him without so much as a glance at its label, let alone its contents, and then returned to folding his arms across his chest. "It's a good deal if we fulfil the main objective, which is to secure peace in the region."

"Five weeks ago, would you have said that?"

Jay studied Matt in silence, whilst the tension in his jaw suggested he didn't appreciate being called out like that, but equally, had no argument against it. The old Jay might grumble and be defeatist at times, but normally a few stern words from the secretary or a nudge from a well-meaning friend would force him to shake it off.

"If you honestly believe that there's no chance of salvaging this deal, then take it straight to Cushing, but if any part of you thinks that maybe there's a way we can make it work, then help us stall the Russians until we can figure something out."

"We've spent the last five weeks trying to figure it out," Jay said. "It comes down to the Russians knowing they can get away with whatever they want without Secretary McCord here."

Kat edged forward in her seat. "Then don't let them."

Matt nodded, and turned back to Jay. "If you act like she's not coming back, of course they'll think they can get away with whatever they want."

"But is she coming back?" Jay's eyebrows raised slightly.

"Russell says she's doing well and could be signed off in the next couple of weeks."

"Really?" Jay's eyebrows arched even higher. "Because last I heard, she tried to leave the clinic, despite knowing that in doing so she'd be forfeiting her job, and not even one step out of the door, she ended up having a panic attack."

Matt's stomach sank like a pebble dropped into cold water. Even now, despite all that he had learnt from the course of his sister's recovery, it was tempting to see a certain finality to each setback. But that's all it was: a setback. "Russell said she had a rocky start. But she stayed. That means something."

Jay shook his head. "She also left. Perhaps that means we're more invested in her job than she is." He eased up from the edge of the desk and retreated to his office chair. "Tell the Russians we'll review the terms and get back to them."

Kat's eyes widened. "Tell me you're not seriously considering it."

Jay tossed the BSR file to one side. "I'm keeping our options open."

He stared down at the pages of one of the documents spread across his desk, though whether he was actually reading the text or just using it as a prop to avoid their gazes and signal that the conversation was done, Matt didn't know.

When moments had passed and still neither Matt nor Kat had risen from their seats, Jay glanced up at them. "That's all."

Matt and Kat had made it three strides down the corridor and towards the break room when Kat shot a scowl through the glass towards Jay, still hunched over his desk and staring down at the paperwork. "Does he really think the secretary isn't coming back?"

Matt peered through the blinds too. But Jay's gaze wasn't on the paperwork as it appeared at first glance, but it was lifted slightly, fixed on the photograph of Chloe that sat at the front corner of the desk. "Maybe he's afraid of what it means if she does."

Because, if the secretary did come back and a McCord White House was still a viable option, then Jay would be forced to choose: the career he'd been working towards and dreaming of for most, if not all, of his adult life; or his daughter. Sometimes the easiest decisions were the ones that you never had to make, the ones that fate took out of your hands.

* * *

**Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think.**

**If there's enough interest before I log off, I _might_ be persuaded to post C50 this evening.**

**Otherwise, new POV tomorrow. : )**


	52. Chapter Fifty: little brother to Secr

**Chapter Fifty**

**…****little brother to Secretary McCord.**

**Will**

**5:24 PM**

The first day, Will feared that he might never walk again. The second day, he knew with a calm certainty that he would never walk again. The third day, as each step wrenched at his remaining muscles and took him back to the days on end he had spent hobbling around after Lizzie had insisted he go out for a run with Henry and his Marine friends all in the name of 'male bonding', he hoped that he'd never _need_ to walk again. In fact, not being forced to exercise the muscles that had wasted yet somehow screamed louder than a patient being operated on without anaesthesia would suit him just fine.

The timer hit zero, the treadmill bleeped, and the belt slowed. Will gripped onto the handrails long after the belt had stopped. Each breath came hard, though not quite hard enough to drown out the erratic patter of his heart as it fought to flutter free from his chest. Sweat soaked the cotton of his tee and turned the pale grey as dark as slate, and the material stuck to his chest and back in that oppressive way reminiscent of the stifling days spent operating in little more than a tent whilst the sun baked the air at the height of a Syrian summer. Though to be back there, even with all the bombings and death threats, might be preferable. At least then he was fighting for something greater, fighting to save a life, not just fighting over each step.

The door to the physiotherapy suite whooshed open. The clank of weights, the determined grunts of the other patients and the probing encouragement of the therapists fell silent as two men in black suits strode inside. Their footsteps echoed up off the vinyl flooring as they marched straight towards Will, and their hands dipped inside the inner pockets of their suit jackets.

Will snatched up the towel from the handrail and dabbed his brow dry, whilst the two men came to a stop in front of the treadmill. Each held out his badge. The taller of the two men spoke for both of them. "Dr Adams, I'm Agent Hayes and this is Agent Perez."

Will's gaze flitted over the badges, and then back to the men. "I see that."

"We'd like to ask you a few questions." Agent Hayes tilted his head towards the door, whilst the other patients watched on as though it were a daytime drama, the kind no one would admit to viewing, yet somehow still caught their eye. "Is now a good time?"

* * *

A table with a glossy walnut veneer stretched the length of the meeting room; it was so long that it left only a narrow channel for people to squeeze past at either end. Will slumped down into one of the sage green chairs on the near side. Although the chair had a thin padding of cushion, the hard surface beneath still bit through and pressed into his ischial tuberosities, yet another reminder of the muscle mass he had lost to weeks of inactivity. He shifted in the seat and tried to get comfortable, but no position was any better than the others.

"Thanks," he murmured when Agent Hayes slid a plastic cup half-filled with water drawn from the dispenser in the corner of the room across the table and towards him. "So, I take it this isn't about that old parking violation."

Agent Hayes held his tie flat to his stomach as he sank down into the chair on the opposite side of the table. He edged himself closer, and the feet of the chair screeched against the floor. With the deep blue darkness of the evening pressing in from outside, the pane of glass behind him reflected each movement. "We'd like to talk to you regarding the attempted assassination of Secretary McCord."

"I like how you just assume that I'm not important enough to warrant poisoning, and the fact that someone did poison me must surely mean that they intended to kill my sister instead." Will took a sip of water, his gaze fixed on Hayes over the brim of the cup.

"We did consider the possibility, but—"

Will held up one hand. "No. I get it." He hunched forward, and returned the cup to the table with a crackle of plastic. "I've spent forty-eight years humbly dwelling in my sister's shadow. Plenty of time to get used to it." He looked between the two agents. "So, how can I help you, gentlemen?"

Perez flipped open the cover on his notebook, and then mirrored Will's stance, his forearms rested against the table. "We'd like for you to talk us through what you can remember from that day, anything at all, and then we can go into more detailed questions."

"Sure. Though, I can't say I'll be able to tell you anything Lizzie hasn't told you already."

Perez glanced around at Hayes, but Hayes met him with an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and then adjusted the wiry frames of his glasses as he retrieved his cell phone from his inside jacket pocket. He tapped at the screen, and slid the phone into the middle of the table. "This interview is informal, but we'll be recording it, so long as that's all right with you. And if you need to stop at any point, just let us know."

"Okay," Will said, but his gaze continued to flit back and forth between the two agents. An _almost_ imperceptible shake of the head—What did that mean?

Hayes gave him a flat smile. "Whenever you're ready."

Will leant back in his seat, though his hands remained rested atop the table and formed a loose corral around the cup. His gaze dipped to the walnut veneer, where the strip lights overhead added a shimmer to the surface, like the haze that had softened the edges of his mind in the days immediately after waking up, until each minute, hour, day bled into the next. The memories from before that still held their sharpness though.

He cleared his throat. "I came into work that morning, usual time, I was running a skills lab up until twelve, I was meant to be meeting Lizzie at one, but she was running late—something to do with the Russians—we ate, we talked, she offered to give me a lift…after that, I remember feeling unwell and Lizzie making a fuss, and then…nothing."

Perez jotted down one or two notes, whilst Hayes held his pen capped between his hands.

"From the time of onset of your symptoms, we know that you ingested the drug while at the restaurant," Hayes said. "Did either you or Secretary McCord bring any food or drink with you into the restaurant?"

"Not that I recall."

"No bottled water, takeaway coffee, wine?"

"No." Will shook his head. "Neither of us were drinking, we just had table water."

"And did you notice anything suspicious while at the restaurant?"

Will took another sip from his cup, and his eyes narrowed on Hayes. "If I had any reason to believe that my food was poisoned, do you really think I would have eaten it?"

Hayes opened his mouth, his tongue poised with the next question.

But Will motioned for him to stop. "And it can't have been at the restaurant, anyway."

Hayes glanced to Perez, and then back to Will. "Why not?"

"Because the only thing I ate there was the pasta."

Perez gave a shrug. "A drug like diasiozin could easily be crushed and mixed into the sauce."

"I'm perfectly aware of that. What I mean is, Lizzie ate it too."

Both men stared at him, their expressions vacant.

"It was her meal, but we split it because my salmon was overdone."

Both men continued to stare at him, still no lights. No wonder they'd made no progress in the investigation if they couldn't understand the basic implication of that.

Will leant forward, and gestured as he spoke, as though that would somehow drum the point into them. "If someone put the diasiozin in the pasta, Lizzie would have fallen ill too."

Hayes looked to Perez, but instead of the flash of realisation Will was waiting for, both their expressions dimmed. At Perez's nod, Hayes reached across to the middle of the table, clicked the cell screen on and tapped the pause button. His gaze flicked up to Will.

And it was a look that Will knew all too well. The look that every doctor hoped he would never wear. The look that they all donned too often in their careers. The look that could mean only one thing: Bad news.

Will's heart stilled. The clock on the wall took over and beat out the pause. So, Hayes and Perez did get it. He was the one who had misunderstood. "Lizzie was poisoned too."

Hayes gave a slow nod. "We thought you were aware."

"Do I look aware to you?" Will rubbed one hand over his face, whilst his mind scrabbled over snatches of thoughts, trying to piece together all the moments since he had woken up. But the more he probed, the more they disintegrated into threads of dust. His hand fell back to the table, and his gaze locked on Hayes. "Is she all right?"

"Yes."

The word came so quick that there was no time for even a puff of relief.

"Then where is she?"

Hayes glanced to Perez, and then back to Will. "We don't know."

"What do you mean, 'you don't know'?"

"It's classified."

"You mean you've taken her to a safe house?"

"No, I mean, we're not allowed to know."

Will's brow furrowed. What the hell had gone on in the last however many weeks?

He braced himself against the table and heaved himself up to standing. But his arms trembled, a tremor large enough to disturb the cup of water and shoot off shards of light as the fluorescent strips above caught upon the ripple at its surface. It seemed almost mocking how quickly Agent Hayes surged to his own feet.

"Dr Adams…where are you going?"

"To find out what's going on, and why no one thought to tell me that my sister was poisoned."

"Secretary McCord is safe—"

"You know, that'd be a lot more convincing if you actually knew where she was."

"—but she remains at risk, so if you could just answer a couple more questions."

Will's legs shook and then gave way, and he collapsed back into the seat. He stooped forward over the table and rested his forehead to his fists. "Look, there was nothing suspicious. We had lunch, we talked, we left. I don't know what more you expect me to say."

"We'd like to ask you about your cell phone."

Will looked up. His frown returned, deeper than before. "What about my cell phone?"

Hayes lifted his finger from the screen of the phone that rested in the middle of the table, the recording now restarted, and he lowered himself back to his seat. "Someone installed software onto your phone, enabling them to listen in to your calls, access any messages sent or received from the device, and track your location."

"That's not possible."

"We have reason to believe this is how the perpetrator knew that you and Secretary McCord would be meeting at the restaurant." Hayes glanced down at the notepad that Perez pushed across the tabletop towards him, having flicked back through several pages of hand-scrawled notes. "Dr McCord said that the secretary arranged lunch with you over the phone. Is that correct?"

"She called the week before, but—"

"Did you and Secretary McCord discuss anything else over the phone?"

"Not that I recall, but it's not like I keep a mental transcript of our every conversation."

"Did you open any suspicious links on your phone in the weeks leading up to the incident?"

"If they looked suspicious, I wouldn't have opened them."

"Did anyone have access to your cell phone in the weeks leading up to the incident?"

"It's not something I generally leave lying around."

"Do you keep your phone on your person at all times?"

"Most of the time."

Hayes stopped writing in his notepad, and looked up. "Most?"

"I sometimes leave it in my locker when I have a lecture or skills lab."

"Do you keep your locker locked?" Perez asked.

Will turned to him. "There wouldn't be much point in putting it in the locker if I didn't."

Hayes leant towards Perez and lowered his voice. "Even if they have CCTV in the area, it won't go back that far. We're talking at least six weeks, probably more."

"I didn't leave my locker unlocked." Will's fingers curled into fists atop the table as his gaze hardened and he looked from Hayes to Perez and back again. "And I resent the implication that I'm somehow to blame here."

"Dr Adams…" Hayes shook his head, though more out of tired exasperation than any attempt to refute the point. "We're just trying to establish how someone gained access to your phone."

"And you're seriously telling me this is the only lead you've got?"

No answer.

Will's gaze continued to flit back and forth. "Right. Well, perhaps the blame for not keeping _the secretary_ safe lies a little closer to home."

When no response came, he pushed himself up from the seat again and willed his muscles to work. Every fibre drew tight and fought against him, but step by step, he made it to the door.

"Dr Adams…" Agent Hayes began.

Will paused. He clung to the door handle, the metal cool and soothing against his palm.

"The key to your locker—?"

He shook his head. "There isn't a key, it's a combination lock."

"I see. And, can I ask, what combination do you use?"

He turned his chin to his shoulder, the agents a blur in the corner of his eye. "It's not 'one, two, three, four', if that's what you're assuming."

"You're forty-eight, correct?"

"So?"

"Is your combination 'one, nine, seven, zero'?"

He twisted back to face the agents. His mouth had turned dry, stilling the answer from flowing from his tongue, probably a good thing too, because Hayes and Perez would struggle to give him a more condescending look. Even Lizzie would have a hard time matching that. He swallowed, and his jaw clenched. "How was I supposed to know that someone was planning on poisoning my sister?"

"Given who your sister is, we would expect you to take reasonable precautions—"

The furrow in Will's brow deepened, and still propping himself up against the door handle, he raised the other hand, a signal for Hayes to stop. "This might come as a shock to you, but not everything I do revolves around Elizabeth McCord."

Hayes cast Perez a sideways glance, and gave a slight shake of the head. _So, he could get more condescending after all_. Then he reached for his cell phone and dragged it towards him. For half a second, his gaze flitted up. "Thank you for your time, Dr Adams. We'll be in touch."

* * *

**6:36 PM**

There came a knock at the door just as Will shuffled out of the bathroom, more of a closet really, attached to the private room he'd been allocated away from the main ward. Just another one of the benefits, or restrictions, he received from being little brother to Secretary McCord—along with the black-suited security guys who roamed the hallway outside.

He rubbed the towel over his hair, still damp from the shower, and padded over to the door.

"Hey, brother." Henry met him with a broad smile the moment he tugged the door open. "I heard you were up and on your feet again." He held up the sheer plastic bag that hung from his fingers. The red pagoda of a Chinese takeaway carton peeked through translucent white. "I thought you could use a break from hospital food."

"Funny…" Will closed the door behind him and the wood clunked back against the frame. Henry set the bag atop the over-bed table that stood in front of the window at the far side of the room and lifted out the cartons. "…because I heard that my sister was poisoned and has now disappeared, at least according to the FBI who seem to think this whole thing is my fault."

Henry stopped. When he turned around to face Will, his smile had withered into nothing.

Will lowered himself into one of the armchairs, and his muscles gave a sigh of relief. "So, at what point were you planning on telling me? Or is that above my clearance level?"

Henry scratched the back of his head and ruffled his hair, and then let his hand fall to his side as he gave a shrug. "Technically, yes. All of this is classified." He pulled up the second armchair, pushed up the sleeves of his charcoal crewneck, and hunched forward in the seat. "I tried telling you a couple of times—"

"You _tried_ telling me?"

"But you weren't taking anything in." He held Will's gaze for a moment, and then bowed his head and gave a slight shake. "And after that…"

"_And after that_ what?"

Henry looked up. His eyes gleamed beneath the fluorescent panels that chequered the ceiling, though they held more darkness than light of their own. "You didn't ask about her at all, so…" His lips flinched, a kind of sad shrug.

"So, this was some kind of punishment because you thought I didn't care enough?"

"Of course not."

"Because I assumed she was at work."

Henry eased up from the seat. "She hasn't been to work since the day it happened." He opened up the two cardboard cartons and split the tub of sticky rice between them, using a pair of chopsticks to prod the grains free, and then he held one of the cartons out to Will.

The aroma of sesame oil and the lemony zing of Sichuan peppercorns wafted up, along with the heat of the chilli. Will tore the paper wrapper off his chopsticks, snapped them apart, and then stirred the rice through the Kung Pao chicken. He kept his gaze on Henry. "What happened to her?"

Henry let out a long sigh as he sank back into his seat. "She collapsed after bringing you to the hospital. She had seizures like you, she fell into a coma like you, she had the same treatment as you; only…she woke up, and you didn't."

"That doesn't explain where she is now."

Henry stooped forward, his own carton clutched in one hand between his knees. He stared out across the room, though his gaze sailed far beyond the confines of the off-white walls, as though he weren't looking at anything physically seen, but replaying the weeks in his mind instead.

The silence unwound, but for every second that passed, the pit of Will's stomach tightened.

"Henry? Where is she?"

Henry shook away the look. He stared down into the carton as he nudged the rice through his portion of Kung Pao chicken. "After she was discharged, she refused to leave the hospital. She felt she needed to be here to look after you, to find a way to make you wake up. She wasn't sleeping, she was barely eating, and she felt a huge amount of guilt…"

He stilled the chopsticks, but continued to stare down into the carton. "After the doctors said they weren't going to give you any more treatment, she came home for a while, but things just got worse." His throat bobbed, and his voice caught. "I think she just gave up hope." He cleared his throat, though the words still stuck. "It got to a point… She said… It became clear that she needed help, proper help, so her therapist suggested she go to a clinic."

Will leant back against the cushion of the chair, and held the carton loosely where it balanced atop the wooden armrest. "So, I end up in a coma, she has a breakdown, and you cart her off to the shrink house?"

Henry looked up. His jaw clenched whilst darkness pooled in his eyes. "I didn't have a choice."

Will studied him. _It got to a point… She said… It became clear… _"I see." He held the carton in front of his chest and lifted out a chunk of chicken. He raised it to his lips, and then paused. "Well, that's a bit melodramatic, even for Lizzie."

Henry's voice spiked. "She thought she was never going to speak to you again."

"Don't you try and pin this on me." Will spoke through his mouthful. The Sichuan pepper stung his lips whilst he chewed over the morsel. Once he had swallowed the bite, he used the tip of his tongue to poke free the strand of chicken that clung to his molars. "I never asked to be poisoned, and I certainly didn't ask her to stay here and exhaust herself trying to look after me. This is her issue, her lifelong panic that one day she might lose me."

"A perfectly reasonable fear, given what happened to your parents."

He stopped and stared hard at Henry, and as something inside him wrenched, he stabbed his chopsticks in Henry's direction. "Don't you dare bring them into this. You have no comprehension of what happened or what that does to a person—"

"Oh, of course not, just thirty years' worth of watching the two of you."

"You don't see me having a breakdown each time she nearly gets herself shot or blown up."

Henry dismissed that with a slow shake of the head. "You've never lived through it. You've never spent hours or days or weeks not knowing if she would survive or not. You've only ever found out after the fact, after you knew she was okay."

There was a truth in that, one Will didn't care to admit. He lowered his gaze to the carton and poked through it before he picked up a clump of spice-tinged rice. "Still…it's no reason for her to fall apart. And you can blame me all you want, but she should have taken care of herself."

"I'm not blaming you." Henry's voice strained. "You asked me where she was."

Will kept his gaze low, but the heat of Henry's stare continued to prickle over him.

"And I have no doubt that were the roles reversed, you wouldn't have felt the same, but that doesn't lessen what she feels or what she's been through." Henry paused, and his voice softened. "I just wish she didn't care so much."

"Well, that makes two of us." Will stuffed the chopsticks into the rice, rested his elbows against the arms of the chair and looked to Henry. "Look, Henry, I'm glad that she's safe, but she needs to stop treating me like some kind of penance. The same goes for you if coming here is to assuage some misplaced sense of guilt over not stopping her from falling apart. I'm not her responsibility, nor yours, and she's certainly not mine."

Henry stared at him for a long moment. In the vacuum of the room, the silence exerted a certain presence, as though one could reach out and press upon it like the surface of a balloon, and just like a balloon, at any second, with a touch too much pressure, it might pop.

Henry swivelled around in his seat and pushed his carton onto the tabletop, though the food inside remained untouched. When he returned to Will, tension marked his jaw. "Well, thank you for clarifying that. But I'm not here out of a sense of responsibility or penance; I'm here because we're family, and to me, that means something."

"And you think that to me it doesn't?"

"I'm beginning to have my doubts."

Will stooped down and placed his own carton next to the foot of the chair. His voice distorted with the stretch that strained through his body. "Perhaps that's what you get for being orphaned." He collapsed back against the cushion. "You learn to survive without."

"You can tell yourself that all you want, but Elizabeth always went out of her way to make sure you never went without."

"And look where that got her."

Henry gave a huff, whilst his lips warped into a smile, one that held more resignation, or perhaps disapproval, than amusement. "You know, I'll never get my head around how the two of you can be so similar and so opposite."

"Two sides of the same coin." Will let the silence linger until it pushed up against him like the nudge at the back of his mind, and then he broke away from Henry's gaze and shook his head. "Look, I appreciate you visiting me, but it's really not necessary, no matter what the motivation."

Henry's smile faded. It left his expression bereft. "Not wanting to see or speak to me? Well, I guess that's just another thing the two of you have in common." He pushed himself up from his chair. But he made it only half a step towards the door before he stopped. "You know, you've spent your whole life doing whatever you want, without a care for how it impacts others, and the reason that you've been able to do that is because she's been there, ready to pick up the pieces. Every time something's gone wrong, or you've needed a place to stay or someone to smooth things over, she's been there for you. You say that you're not her responsibility. Then stop using her when it suits you, only to push her away when it doesn't."

"I've never asked her for anything."

"No." Henry's lips tugged into a flat line. "You just expect her to do what you want."

Henry strode away, and left the door ajar. The clatter of carts, the distant chatter scattered with discordant laughs, and the rise and fall of footfall flowed through from the corridor. It made the silence inside the room deeper, more oppressive, but with the ache in his muscles poised to take hold once more, Will daren't get up. Instead, the words drifted circles through his mind, like the hawks that used to wheel low over the quarry at the edge of the horse farm, in the days before he and Lizzie learnt how transient life was; how one day you were there, the next you went out for milkshakes, someone ran you off the road, and the pulse that invigorated your cells and allowed your neurones to spark into something greater than the sum of their parts, to form what some might call the soul, stopped.

_You just expect her to do what you want_. But if she had done what he had wanted, she would have prioritised herself and moved on, and that way he wouldn't have awoken in a world where, through poison or her own sense of guilt, she might have been the one to die first.

* * *

**1987**

"So…I've met a guy." Lizzie sat at the opposite end of the couch in the student lounge, and dug her chopsticks through a carton of Kung Pao chicken. Most of the other students had gone home for the holiday weekend, leaving the accommodation echoingly quiet and full of shadows, but in a way, that silence was comfortable, something they had grown used to.

Will twisted around and studied her whilst he chewed over his mouthful. "Oh really?"

"His name's Henry." A slight blush crept up through her cheeks, lit by the grey-white glare from the television screen they'd put on in the background. "He's a religion major and ROTC. He invited me to spend Thanksgiving with his family, actually."

"But you'd rather be here with me?"

"We've been going out for a while, but I thought maybe it was too soon."

"But it's heading that way?"

"I think so…" Her eyebrows arched a fraction. "I hope so."

A smile came to his lips. "Well, good for you." He picked up a clump of sticky rice, once white but now stained fiery orange. He continued to watch her whilst they both ate. "So…does Henry have a last name?"

"McCord."

After a moment, he chuckled. "Well, now you have to marry him."

She turned to him with a frown. "Why?"

"Elizabeth McCord." When her frown deepened, along with her blush, he spelled it out with a gesture from his chopsticks. "E equals M C squared." He shook his head to himself and returned to the carton. He trapped one of the peanuts between his chopsticks and then popped it into his mouth. "That's way too big for a nerd like you to pass up."

"I hadn't thought of that." Both her voice and gaze turned distant, as though she truly hadn't thought about it, but the smile that played at the corner of her lips—the one that had been at the edge of her expression all day like a light simmering beneath the surface—suggested that perhaps the marriage part had come to mind at least once or twice, even if she insisted it was too soon. That, and the fact that, for the first time ever, she hadn't protested at him calling her a nerd.

His own smile faded a fraction, whilst something inside of him tugged, something he couldn't quite define. "Whatever happens, you're an Adams, first and foremost. Don't forget that."

She returned his stare as she chewed her mouthful of chicken. It felt as though perhaps she had sensed that tug too. "You know, he invited you as well."

He huffed. "Because he knows we don't have a family of our own?"

"No, _Will._ Because he knows that you're my family, and I want you there."

The tug eased a little, though he'd never admit it. He gave a shrug. "Well, I suppose we can't live on grilled cheese and takeout forever."

"So, Christmas?"

"Sure." He looked to her and gave another shrug. "I'd like to meet the guy whose name alone makes Lizzie Adams blush."

They returned to their meals and to their silence, and he fought to suppress the niggle at the back of his mind, the niggle that told him that the tug he had felt—that thing he couldn't quite define but that came with the thought of Lizzie trading in 'Adams' for 'McCord'—might just be warning him that one day, despite all that tied them together, they'd both have to move on from this unlikely equilibrium they had found, that one day, whether through matters of life or another untimely death, they would have to let go, that one day, it would no longer be the two of them anymore and at best he would be redundant and at worst he would be forced to learn what it truly meant to be alone.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Thoughts, please. Ta. : )**


	53. Chapter Fifty-One: a single star

**Note:** I hope you enjoyed the two chapters yesterday. If you didn't spot that two went up, now's your chance to catch up. (I think the 'updated' field only updates once per twenty-four hour period, regardless of how many times I post, so if you're not signed up for alerts, you'll have to keep an eye on the 'chapter' field instead. I could be wrong.) Please take a minute and let me know what you think. Reviews give me a real boost, especially as I continue to proof the rest of the story.

I'm glad some of you liked the Einstein reference! I've been dying to get that into a fic ever since I first started obsessing over the show.

I know some of you—okay, most of you—are keen to get back to Elizabeth's and Henry's POVs. (I am too!) You'll be pleased to hear that there's a lot more focus on E in the rest of part four. H plays a more prominent role in parts five and six.

* * *

**Chapter Fifty-One**

**…****a single star.**

**Elizabeth**

**Thursday, 29th November, 2018**

**1:56 PM**

"And as you lie back in Savasana, let your mind go. No need to move, no need to think, just be present in this moment…"

Elizabeth's mind whirred as she stared up at the textured swirls that plastered the ceiling. Something was missing. Something she had forgotten. Or not forgotten. It was just hidden, like a single star amidst the myriad of constellations that swathed a clear night's sky. Back when they were kids, before it happened, her father would take her and Will out when the air was brisk from lack of cloud cover, and they would huddle together on the back of the old pickup truck that they used for delivering bales of hay to the horses in the outer fields, and they would wrap themselves in the slightly musty smelling woollen blankets that the straggles of hay clung to, sometimes passing around a flask of malted hot chocolate that their mother had prepared, and their father would point out the different pictures that lit up the sky and he would show them how, if you traced the dot-to-dots, you could pinpoint a specific star: Deneb, Aldebaran, Procyon. And, for a moment, the universe had felt at once so vast and yet like a secret that only the three of them shared.

But how could you ever hope to find a single star amongst all those shimmering dots when you didn't know what it was, exactly, you were looking for?

"Elizabeth…? Elizabeth…? Elizabeth…?"

Elizabeth flinched. The jolt hurtled her back to the studio. She eased herself up to sitting, her palms tacking to the faintly hatched foam of the yoga mat. The rest of the class had disappeared, leaving her alone with the instructor, a woman in her late thirties who called herself Willow and who now stood at the end of the mat, bent forward with her hands braced against her Lycra-clad thighs as she peered down at Elizabeth.

"Everything all right?" Willow asked.

"Sure." Elizabeth flashed her a taut smile. She pushed herself up to a squat, brushed her palms down against her sweatpants, and rose to her feet. "Just thinking."

"And how did you feel in today's session?"

"Great." Elizabeth dragged the mat over to the pile next to the door. The edge of the foam scuffed across the laminate flooring. "Still a little bit stiff."

"I meant, how did you feel emotionally?"

"I realise that—" She dumped the mat on top of the others and gave it a quick spritz with the antibacterial spray. The faint sting of its citrus scent diffused through the air. Then she shot a glance over her shoulder. "But I was trying to avoid the question."

"You're not a fan of talking about your feelings, are you?"

"Who is?" She stooped down and snatched up her marl grey sweatshirt from its crumpled heap on the floor by the wall. She turned back to face Willow as she wrestled the jumper on and rolled the sleeves up to her elbows. "I feel fine. I just don't feel the need to elaborate on every single emotion in real-time, like I'm giving some kind of sports commentary."

"I hear what you're saying, but when we don't talk about our feelings, our body can store them as tension in our muscles, and through our practise these emotions can rise to the surface and be released, and so it's important that we remain open to these emotions and give ourselves permission to feel them deeply, without judgment or blame, and only then can we become true spiritual warriors—"

"See, this—" Elizabeth motioned to all of Willow. "—is why I watch C-SPAN."

Willow's mouth remained open, and her tongue floundered for a response. It looked as though she were running the comment back through her mind, and again and again, at first unsure if she had heard Elizabeth correctly, but then her brow pinched as though she'd decided that she _had_ heard her correctly and now sought to understand.

Elizabeth took the opportunity to haul open the door. It let out a crisp swoosh that cut through the studio. "Same time tomorrow?" When Willow gave an uncertain nod, Elizabeth flashed her another smile. "Great. See you then."

* * *

In her room, Elizabeth pulled open the top drawer of the dresser that stood just inside the door. It jarred and shook the vase of lilies and milk-yellow roses, the stems of which had already begun to soften and wilt, and a few of the curled-edged petals tumbled onto the oak. She grabbed the manila file that she had tucked at the back, beneath the jumble of underwear, and then nudged the drawer shut again, releasing a waft of the flowers' overripe scent.

Something was missing. It needled at the back of her mind. All she had to do was find a way to remember it, to soothe the itch, and maybe then her memories would actually be useful, rather than just a chilling imprint of that day.

She padded towards the bed, peeling back the cover of the file as she went, and then she perched at the edge of the mattress and pulled out the stack of glossy A4 sheets. Her own pair of reading glasses rested next to Henry's on the bedside table. She fumbled open their plastic arms and then slipped them on and peered down at the photographs. The light that swelled in through the window and filled the air with a lazy warmth rippled off the surface of the images as she thumbed through them, just as it had done on the day Russell had delivered them to her and demanded that she look at them, demanded that she remember. This time she took in the images fully, no soft focus, no blunting the edges or hazing the lines. All she needed was one jolt, one snap of clarity that would point her towards the detail that her mind urged her to recall.

To begin with, the images were just images, each a visual statement: a restaurant booth, with cutlery laid out atop the pearl white tablecloth, the stainless steel glinting in the light cast from the candle flames; a stretch of dull grey sidewalk, with the cars on the road flowing counter to the stream of suit-clad pedestrians that coursed by; a trauma bay, with its bright blue curtain drawn back and the bed missing, whilst plastic-wrapped supplies peeked from the drawers of the carts and rested on the sides. But the longer she studied the images, the more the bedroom around her blurred, as though the photographs were drawing her in, out of this world and into another, until it wasn't the images that she saw, but snippets of memories, and each memory held its own thread of a feeling: a flutter of panic, the thrum of her pulse surging too fast, a trickling chill that oozed into her fingers and toes, a thick leather cinch that wrapped around her chest and tightened notch by notch, a wave of hot and clammy nausea that roiled through her veins.

It felt as though she could spend days in that place, running through each moment as though she were rehearsing it, so that she could reproduce it in minute detail were anyone ever to ask. But the longer she let herself stay in that place, the more her grip on the present slipped, until a minute could disappear in a second and the rush of feelings stilled, then chilled, then turned her to stone.

"Elizabeth?"

The voice knocked her from her daze, and she twisted around to face the doorway. Amy leant against the frame. The chipped cobalt blue paint that lacquered her nails popped against the pale oak. Elizabeth tethered herself to that, whilst the world around her sank back into place.

"Don't forget your session starts in five."

"Sure." Elizabeth jostled the photographs together and stuffed them back into the folder. She snubbed the end of her nose with the heel of her thumb, and then tucked the manila file beneath her pillow and covered it over with the edge of the quilt. "I'm just heading there now."

Whilst the tread and squeak of Amy's footsteps faded down the corridor, Elizabeth slipped off her reading glasses and returned them to the bedside table where they perched next to Henry's. She stopped, and then let her fingers drift towards his frames. Her fingertips ghosted over the black plastic, and for the first time in a while, the hollow that filled her chest now ached, as though one of the feelings it had swallowed echoed up in a bid to escape. _This will pass. You have my glasses._

But it wasn't his glasses that she wanted, and she would never have needed his glasses had she not allowed this to happen in the first place. She shook her head to herself—shook away the thought before the feeling could distort and twist itself into a shadow that would grip her and drag her down again. Then she reached past his and her glasses to the box of ginger snaps that stood behind. She eased one of the biscuits out from the top of the foil packet, and then pushed herself up from the edge of the bed and padded away. She ambled along the corridor, and as a blush of cold radiated through her bare soles, she took a bite. The spices flooded over her tongue and engulfed her in a surge of warmth. _One step at a time, Bess, one step at a time._

* * *

**3:04 PM**

"How are you feeling today?" Dr Sherman perched on one of the armchairs in the therapy room, her notebook closed and balanced in her lap, her biro capped and held between both hands whilst she propped her elbows against the armrests, the soft leather pitting around them.

On the couch opposite, Elizabeth sat with one knee drawn loosely towards her, her bare toes curled into the cool leather cushion, whilst she cradled a mug of black coffee to her chest, close enough that its warmth brushed through her sweatshirt and tee. She kept her gaze on the mug, once white but now faintly stained with a thousand teas and coffees, whilst she grappled for the right word to encapsulate all that stirred inside. The longer the silence gaped, the more the tightness in her chest grew and grew, and it felt as though the jagged edges of stars were prickling across the inside of her skin. "Frustrated."

"You're making good progress."

"But none of it's any use to the investigation."

Dr Sherman turned her head from side to side, and the hoops of her gold earrings caught the sunlight that escaped around the edges of the blind. "That's not our primary goal here."

"I'm aware of that." Elizabeth took a tentative sip and met Dr Sherman's eye over the brim.

"But it's frustrating you nonetheless?"

Elizabeth broke the gaze and returned to staring distantly at the coffee. She shook her head to herself. "I keep running through what happened, and it feels like I'm missing something, like there's something there, staring straight at me, but I just can't see it."

"And how does thinking about what happened make you feel?"

She took a breath and held it there until it pressed outwards on her chest and she had no choice but to let it escape with a rush. "Like I could lose days, or weeks, to just turning it over in my mind." She picked a piece of lint from the cotton of her sweatpants and let it flutter to the floor before she looked up at Dr Sherman. "It's like I'm trying to work it all into a coherent story, but the more I talk myself through it, the more it drags me in, and then I'm not sure where I begin and where the story ends."

"And, when you're thinking about it, do you feel anxious or panicked at all?"

She considered that for a moment, and then gave a nod. "A bit… Though, not to start with. It's like it only hits me once I realise that I've let myself slip into the thoughts, like I suddenly wake up and find myself in the middle of the ocean with no idea how I got there."

"And when that happens, are you able to anchor yourself?" Dr Sherman's lips quirked. "No pun intended."

Elizabeth allowed herself to share in a fraction of that smile, though it faded before it had a chance to take hold. "I can… But part of me feels like maybe if I were to just let myself get swept up in it, then maybe I would remember what it is that's bugging me…" Her eyebrows raised. "Or maybe I'd just lose myself… I don't know."

"It's possible that there's nothing there to remember." Dr Sherman let go of one end of the pen and her hands fell outwards before they resumed the same position as before, a kind of shrug, in a way. "This was a carefully planned attack. The security agencies and your own agents were completely unaware, and as far as I know, the FBI haven't been unable to find anything."

"So, you think I'm obsessing over nothing?"

Dr Sherman gave a cautious smile. "I think your focus is perhaps a little narrow." She shifted in her seat, and her shoulders rounded forward. "How would it make you feel if you couldn't remember anything that helps the investigation?"

Elizabeth took another sip of coffee. Its bitterness stung her tongue. "Guilty."

"Tell me about that."

She let her foot slip down from the leather seat of the couch and she stooped forward, the balls of her feet pressed into the floor, her heels raised. Her gaze locked on Dr Sherman's. "If it weren't for me, for my job, then none of this would have happened. And if I can't help capture who did this, then it could happen again." She swept one hand towards the window. "Or they could target my family instead."

"So, you feel that by taking this job you've put yourself and your family at risk?"

"Yes." The response shot from her mouth.

"And when you were first thinking about taking the job, did you discuss the risks with your family?"

"Yes." The answer came a little slower this time, a little less certain.

"And what was the result of that discussion?"

Elizabeth massaged her brow, and then returned her hand to the coffee cup that she clutched in front of her knees. "We agreed that secretary of state isn't exactly high up on the list when it comes to assassination attempts, and that any risks would be offset by having a security detail."

"So, you agreed that you couldn't anticipate you would be targeted, and that you would trust your safety to the agents tasked with protecting you?"

"Yes."

"Yet now you feel that you should have anticipated this happening, that it was your job to prevent it, and that you're the one responsible for stopping any further attacks?"

Elizabeth paused, her mouth open. She ran the statements back through her mind. They were about as congruent as a hexagon and a triangle… She held up one hand, her fingers splayed. "Okay, I get the contradiction, but that doesn't help."

Dr Sherman gave a light shrug. "I'm just interested in why you blame yourself, rather than the people who did this to you, or the people who are tasked with protecting you."

"Because I'm the one who made the decision to take the job in the first place." Elizabeth's voice strained. "And if I hadn't, then we would never have been in this position."

"And if your family had told you that they didn't want you to take the job and you turned the offer down, you would never have been in this position." Dr Sherman paused for a second. Then— "Do you blame them for what's happened?"

"Of course not."

"And if the president hadn't offered you the job, you wouldn't have had to make that decision and then you would never have been in this position. Do you blame him for what's happened?"

"No."

"And if the electorate hadn't voted President Dalton into office, he wouldn't have been able to offer you the job and then you would never have been in this position. Do you blame the public for what's happened?"

Elizabeth swigged from her coffee cup. "Well, I was one of those voters, so…"

Dr Sherman gave a huff as though suppressing a laugh. She clutched her hands together atop her notebook; her pen thrust up from between them. "My point is that every moment in life is a sum of multiple decisions and interactions, very few of which are our own or are under our control. Your decision was only one part of this situation, yet you assign yourself all the blame."

Elizabeth studied her for a long moment, whilst beneath the silence, her thoughts stirred like the sands thrown up by the shamals that coursed over Iraq. Had Conrad not offered her the job; had Russell not backed down from his 'well-meaning advice' that she was unsuitable in every way; had Marsh not gotten cold feet over the coup in Iran; had Munsey not sought to 'deliver peace in the Middle East'; had Henry not made her choose between him and Baghdad; had her mathematics professor not highlighted her as a candidate for the CIA; had Will not insisted that they go out for milkshakes; had her parents not let her stay at home that day.

Elizabeth pinched her eyes shut and took a breath, one that lodged at the top of her lungs like a cloud of lead that pressed down upon everything else. "Do you think we could perhaps circle back to this once I've found a way to remember what it is that I can't remember?"

"What do you think it is that you can't remember?"

Elizabeth's eyes bugged whilst her hand fell back to her lap. "Well, if I knew that then it wouldn't be a problem."

"Start from the beginning."

"I've already gone through it, like, a thousand times." Elizabeth's voice strained against the itch of frustration, and she surged to her feet as the feeling fizzled through her muscles and urged for some kind of release.

"Then maybe there's nothing to remember."

The prickle of Dr Sherman's gaze followed Elizabeth as she paced back and forth behind the couch. The nylon carpet prickled beneath her bare soles. And something prickled at the back of her mind too. "There's definitely something there."

"Then maybe you're defining the beginning wrong."

Elizabeth stopped and looked to Dr Sherman. "What do you mean?"

Dr Sherman's shoulders rose, and then fell just as fast. "As I said, this attempt was carefully planned. It didn't start when you arrived at the restaurant, if anything, that's the end point… Or it should have been."

Elizabeth's gaze softened, and her tone took on the same faraway quality. _Of course… _"I need to go back further." Her grip on the coffee mug that she clutched to her chest tightened, whilst her focus snapped back to the room, back to Dr Sherman. "But how far? They could've been planning this for weeks, if not months."

"As my grandmother always used to say, if you lose something, all you've got to do is retrace your steps and hope that someone hasn't pinched it in the meantime."

"Work backwards… Right…" Elizabeth took a sip of coffee, let its warmth unfurl across her tongue, and then began pacing again, slower this time though, an idling amble that drifted her from one side of the room to the other.

Working through her memory felt like playing a game of Hunt the Thimble—or Dime, because they didn't own a thimble—back when the kids were little and five straight days of rain had kept them cooped up and cabin-feverish on the horse farm. Only now, there were no cries of 'cold' or 'warm' or 'boiling' to guide her, and she didn't know what it was she was looking for; all she could hope for was the barest tug of recall or a flutter of intuition at best. Plus, this wasn't a game, a last ditch attempt at passing the time and stopping the whines of '_I'm bored_'; blameless or not, the fact remained, if she didn't find a way to help the investigation, if the FBI didn't capture whoever was responsible for this, her life and the lives of her family could be at risk.

_No pressure._

Before the restaurant came work. Lots of work. Meetings back to back. Jay had been on edge about the BSR deal; Blake had pretended not to receive a call from Henry, as though she wasn't aware of their DEFCON system; someone, she suspected Matt, had taken the last bear claw, so she was left famished after her morning run. Nothing niggled about that.

Before work came getting ready for work. Showering and getting dressed. Henry reassuring her that everything would be fine and that she didn't have to worry about Will, though the look in his eyes held nothing but concern for her as he watched her from the disheveled sheets of their bed. Nothing niggled about that.

Before that came sex. Okay sex. Not 'end of the world' sex. Not like before she left for Iran, when they'd kidded it could be their last time, only for that to become a real possibility, and for it to become true in some ways. It would be their last time for a while, because after that she wasn't in the mood; in fact, she couldn't even recall what 'the mood' felt like. Instead, all she felt—aside from the hollow akin to the one that lived inside her now—was the way that Henry kept looking at her, as though a single touch might see her either fracture or snap. That sex had been 'last time' sex; this time it had been…all right. Henry had been as attentive as ever, and she'd wanted to be present with him, to stop worrying about the presidency, the nightmares, Will… But she couldn't switch off her mind and give in to the sensations, and the more she tried to push the thoughts away and enable herself to relax, the more the thoughts and the tension that they held pushed back. In a way, through having sex, she'd wanted to apologise too, to reconnect…

Something niggled about that.

Elizabeth sank down onto the cushions of the couch. They deflated around her. She hunched forward, and as she clutched the mug atop her knees, she rubbed her fingertip over the bare patch of skin where her wedding ring ought to sit. It felt soft and vulnerable without it. She looked up at Dr Sherman with the hint of a wince. "Henry and I fought the morning that it happened."

Dr Sherman met her with a neutral expression, one that did nothing to acknowledge the significance that fact would have held had the attempt been a success. "What did you fight about?"

"The fact that I'd been going out running first thing."

"I see." Though the pinch her brow said she didn't see at all. "And he was angry with you?"

"No." Elizabeth shook her head. "I was angry with him."

"Why?"

"Because it felt like he was trying to psychoanalyse me—" She thrust one hand up, and her fingers spiked along with her tone. "—saying that the dreams I'd been having and going out running were all because I was worried about Will."

"And you didn't agree with his analysis?"

"No." Her voice softened, and her hand drifted back to wrap around the coffee cup in her lap. "I did… I do."

Dr Sherman's frown deepened.

"Look, I love that he knows me, I love that he understands me, but it also irritates the heck out of me when sometimes it feels like he understands me better than I understand myself. And not only does he understand me in a way that, apparently, I'm utterly incapable of, but he then uses that understanding to try and rationalise what I'm feeling." The ends of her hair quivered against the curve of her jaw, whilst her gaze fixed on the near side of the coffee table. "Sometimes you just want to feel what you're feeling and not have someone explain it to you, because as soon as they do explain it to you, that feeling loses its edge and it starts to fade. And sometimes feeling horrendous and not knowing why you feel horrendous is better than feeling nothing at all." She lifted her gaze and stared at Dr Sherman, looking for a flicker of recognition. A flicker of anything. But as the silence took over once more, she let her gaze drift away again, back to the mug in her hands. What did it matter anyway? If their argument was what she'd been struggling to remember, it didn't help; it just added another string of guilt to the whole situation, another note to that discordant sound. She raised the mug, and then paused as the corner of her lips flinched. "I don't know. Maybe I am just obsessing over nothing."

_So, the vivid dreams, the going out running at ridiculous hours, the spying on our neighbours and obsessing about their cars…_

She stopped. The cars. No—_the_ car. The one that had been parked outside all week. The one that kept migrating each time she went out for a run. The one that definitely did not belong to one of her neighbours, not unless they'd traded in their Lexus or Tesla for some beat-up runabout.

"There was a car outside the house. That's what's been bugging me. The car." Elizabeth leant forward and clunked her cup down on the coffee table, causing the liquid to slosh against the sides. She scrambled to her feet. "I thought there was something off about it at the time, but Henry said I was just obsessing. But what if someone was watching the house. The FBI need to—"

"Elizabeth…" Dr Sherman called after her as Elizabeth strode towards the door. "Where are you going?"

"To call Russell."

"You can't use the phone without a phone privilege."

Elizabeth froze, and spun around. She eyed Dr Sherman. "What?"

Dr Sherman gave a half-shrug, as if to say—_Rules are rules_.

"You're kidding me." Elizabeth edged half a step towards her. A heavy frown gripped her brow. "I've just remembered something that might actually help the case, and you're seriously telling me that I can't call Russell or let the FBI know?"

"Finish the session first, and then I'll give you a privilege."

"I'm pretty sure that catching an assassin takes precedent over talking about my feelings."

"Russell agreed. Therapy comes first. He said that seeing as you're quite goal-oriented, using a rewards system might help."

Elizabeth snorted. "Why not just give me a sticker chart?"

A flash of something passed across Dr Sherman's expression.

"He didn't." Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. "He actually suggested using a sticker chart?"

"I think he was being flippant."

Elizabeth bit down on the inside of her cheek. _God, she could kill him_.

She considered staring Dr Sherman down in the vague hope that if she stared long enough and hard enough, perhaps Dr Sherman would see just how unreasonable she was being and how important the call was, and perhaps then she would cave. And for a while she did stare.

But after a few seconds had unraveled into silence, she shook her head to herself, her eyebrows raised in an acceptance of defeat, or not defeat per se, but an acceptance that perhaps to win this battle and escape the rest of the session would be a false victory, because if she was anywhere near close to being on the same wavelength as Russell Jackson, something must be seriously wrong.

She padded over to the couch, slumped onto the cushions, and snatched up her coffee mug. She met Dr Sherman's eye. "So, what do I have to do to earn my gold star?"

"I'd like for us to circle back to your feelings of guilt…"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Thoughts are appreciated. : )**


	54. Chapter Fifty-Two: it wasn't her

**Note: **Thank you for all your comments on the previous chapter! They made me smile.

* * *

**Chapter Fifty-Two**

**…****it wasn't her.**

**Elizabeth**

**4:16 PM**

_Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring-ring_.

Elizabeth fingered the edge of the business card and pressed the corner into the pad of her thumb whilst she waited for Russell to pick up. With each echo of the dial tone, the pit of her stomach wrung one twist tighter. It felt as though every passing second were another opportunity for the person—or people—behind the poisoning to slip away. She tried to silence the whisper that snaked through the alleys of her mind, reminding her of the millions of seconds that had passed since her interview with the FBI and all the opportunities those seconds had presented, not only for the people responsible to escape, but for her to stop herself from ending up where she was now. How different things could have been had she only told the truth back then. She focused instead on the fact that remembering the car was a possible lead, it could be just what they needed to make progress in the case now, and more importantly, she'd managed to recall it without flailing into panic, and that was progress—a step forward—of a different kind.

"Hello?" Russell's voice rasped down the line.

"Russell." Elizabeth turned her back on the office desk and on Amy who perched on the chair behind it. She lowered her voice to a hiss. "Did you seriously suggest that Dr Sherman use a sticker chart for my therapy?"

"Whatever works, right? And either it is working and you actually managed to earn yourself a phone privilege, or you've left a pile of bodies behind you on your way to get to the phone."

She paused. He wasn't wrong. About it working, not about the bodies. "Whatever." She shook it off. "Look, I remembered something. I know it doesn't sound like much, but there was a car outside my house leading up to that day. I had a funny feeling about it at the time."

A scuffling sound came from the other end of the line.

Elizabeth wrapped the white plastic cord around one finger, and then let it ping free. "I know, you probably think it's nothing…"

The scuffling sound continued.

"…but what if somebody was watching the house?"

There came a muffled slam.

She frowned. "Russell?"

"Sorry. I was thinking."

"Well, do you think you could talk to DS? See if they—"

"This car… Was it there when you came back from the hospital?"

She stopped. Her mouth hung open. "Possibly… Why?"

"Right. I'm on my way." More scuffling. He paused, and then added, "I'd tell you to stay put, but I trust you've learnt your lesson after last time."

* * *

**5:44 PM**

"Elizabeth." Russell's voice came from the doorway to her room.

"Evening, Russell." Elizabeth finished the sentence she was writing, clicked the end of the pen and disappeared the nib, and then folded the cover shut on the therapy file. She pushed the file across the dressing table, so that it was in line with the mirror at the back.

She swivelled around in her seat on the padded stool, whilst Russell kicked the doorstop free and urged the door into its frame. "You know, you didn't need to come all this way."

"Actually—" He grabbed the spindle-back chair from the corner of the room, his fingers wrapping around the top rail, and he set it down opposite her. "—I did."

The manila file that had been tucked beneath his elbow and pinned to his side fell onto the wooden seat with a heavy slap, and he wrestled off his black woollen overcoat and draped it over the back of the chair. With the end of his tie held flat to his stomach, he lifted the folder and settled onto the seat. His gaze flicked up and met her own. "This had to be done in person."

Her stomach dropped. "Conrad's replaced me."

His brow furrowed. "What? No. Of course not." Then, as quickly as it had arisen, the frown eased away again, whilst his gaze turned distant, as though he were pondering the possibility—not entirely unfavourably. He gave a shrug. "Well, not yet anyway."

"Then what's this about?"

"The car you said you saw." Russell folded back the cover of the file and sifted through the A4 sheets wedged inside. He parted the bottom few from the rest of the stack and eased the top ones out. "I want you to take a look at these and see if it's there."

Elizabeth continued to stare at him, not entirely sure whether she wanted to look at the images or not, given the photographs he had ambushed her with last time. But then he gave the photographs a flick and their glossy finish caught a ripple of the yellow light that rained down from the bulb overhead. She took the wad of images from him and rested their bottom edge against her lap whilst she worked her way through them; she studied each in turn and then took it from the top of the pile and added it to the bottom. A line of three black SUVs parked on the road outside her house, all cloaked in a midnight haze whilst the yellow-white dots of streetlights dappled their bodywork; a barrier of cars, Jason just visible as he strolled along the sidewalk beyond, his backpack slung over one shoulder, the strap gripped in one hand, his brow fixed in a frown whilst his gaze held glued to the screen of his cell phone; Henry caught mid-stride as he hurried towards the front porch, the DS agents who stood outside meeting him with puzzled looks, whilst a flash of silver blurred the right-hand side of the image as a car streamed past.

Only three photographs in, and Elizabeth stopped. Her stomach had clenched into a knot, one so tight it felt as though not even a blade could loose it. She looked up at Russell. Her throat closed around the words and coated them with grit. "Please tell me this was FBI surveillance."

Russell massaged his neck. "That certainly would have been preferable."

"Russell." Her tone warned him.

His chest swelled with a long inhalation. He paused. Then, just when she thought she might have to prompt him again, he shrugged, his lips flinched at one corner and his hand fell back to his lap. "Morejon paid someone to keep an eye on your house."

Her eyes bugged. "What?" She thought he had said… But he couldn't have, surely… "Carlos Morejon paid someone to spy on my family? Senator Carlos Morejon?"

"You can repeat his name all you want, it doesn't change the fact."

Her mind scrambled to understand, but even for a weasel like Morejon, it made no sense. The words fled her with her breath. "But why?"

"Because you went AWOL. That's why."

Her eyes widened even further. "My brother was critically ill."

"Yeah, well, he didn't buy into that."

"Of course he didn't, because if a member of his own family were ill, he'd probably beat the doctors away with a stick just so that he could pull the plug, God forbid their illness should inconvenience him in any way or disrupt his tour of the cable news shows." She let out a huff, though it did little to diffuse the simmer that seethed beneath her skin. To think she'd actually welcomed that man into her home, had treated him with the respect he so clearly didn't deserve, had defended him God knows how many times… She gave another huff, and then looked to Russell. "What was he hoping to find anyway?"

"A story." Russell slipped one of the remaining sheets out from the manila file and held it out to her. This time he didn't shake it or force it towards her, just held it there, a bridge sagging between them, until she was ready to take it for herself.

She placed the stack of photographs on top of the dressing table behind her, and lifted the image from Russell. The pads of her thumbs tacked to the surface and left clammy whorls over the ink at the edges, and as she studied the photograph, her frown deepened second by second whilst her stomach turned cold and sour.

It wasn't her. The woman might be stood outside _her_ house, next to _her _motorcade, with _her_ DS agents hovering around her. But it wasn't her. The woman might be wearing _her_ sneakers, _her_ powder blue pyjama bottoms, and _her_ black woollen coat. But it wasn't her. The woman might be about to climb into Dr Sherman's car just as _she_ had done the night she had left for the clinic. But it wasn't her. That woman's face was gaunt and pale, her eyes were two dark hollows, and her clothes hung loose from her scrawny frame. It wasn't her. That woman held as much presence as the shadows that surrounded her, as though one touch of light would see her evaporate. It wasn't her. That woman wasn't a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend, the secretary of state. It wasn't her.

Only it was. Or what she had let herself become.

"Secretary of Unfit Mental State."

Elizabeth's gaze snapped up to Russell. She swallowed, but her voice clagged. "Please tell me this isn't out there. Please tell me someone hasn't printed this."

"Mike B picked it up before anyone could get their hands on it, and there hasn't been anything since."

She snubbed the end of her nose against the back of her hand, and then tossed the photograph down onto the bed. Not only to distance herself from it—from herself—but because of the way that the sheet fluttered and shimmered beneath the lights and drew attention to the tremble in her fingers. She cleared her throat. "But I take it you've had to read in Morejon, that he knows where I am."

Russell met her with silence.

"Russell…" She eyed him. "You did read in Morejon…right?"

Russell held to his silence, and though he might have liked to think that his expression remained neutral, something lurked beneath it, like the blackened waters that swarm below a sheet of ice. And if it weren't for the fact that he was Russell Jackson and therefore such a feeling didn't enter into his emotional repertoire, she would have labelled that something as guilt.

"Russell." She turned her head from side to side, the movement as slow as the realisation that crept over her, as slow as the sun inching into the chill of dusk. "Tell me you didn't."

Russell cast a glance behind him, as though concerned someone might overhear through the closed door, and then he turned back to face her, his voice an angry hiss. "He was going to paint the secretary of state as an alcoholic and a drug addict, for crying out loud."

"How many times do we have to go over this? We don't do oppo."

"What choice did I have?"

"Read him in."

"What?" Russell's eyes widened. "And tell him that not only were you and your brother poisoned and that we have no idea who the hell's behind it, but that you had a nervous breakdown and had to check yourself into a clinic because your husband thought you might top yourself?" He swept one hand towards the photograph on the bed. "We might as well just print the story ourself."

"You could have appealed to his better nature."

Russell's voice strained with exasperation. "He doesn't have a better nature."

"Then leverage him."

"I did leverage him. He keeps his mouth shut, and we don't go after his wife." He gave a hollow laugh. "Seems like leverage enough."

"But you leaked the story anyway."

"It had to be done."

Her jaw clenched. "There were other ways."

"Fighting fair gets you nowhere when the other guy's taking a crowbar to your kneecaps."

She shook her head, and eased to her feet. A brisk draught seeped through the window behind. She hauled the curtains across with a grating sweep, blocking out the chill, along with the darkness that pressed in from outside. "His family don't deserve to get wrapped up in this."

"And neither do yours."

She stopped, and looked back at him.

He kept his gaze low whilst he motioned towards the photograph again. "Not only does the creep leak this photo to some lowlife blogger and try and wreck your reputation and tarnish the whole darn administration along with it, but he has the gall to come skulking around the office, harassing Stevie, trying to press her for more information."

_Oh…_ The swell of indignation drained. _So, it wasn't just about the politics._

He pinched the bridge of his nose, paused like that, and then let his hand fall back to the file balanced in his lap. "Look, we did it your way before, I let you protect him, and this is the thanks you get." He feigned interest in the end of his tie, as though checking the diamond print pattern for flecks of lint before he smoothed it down against his shirt, anything to keep his gaze away from her. "And you can disagree with the decision all you want, but it's done. It's over."

Elizabeth leant against the edge of the dressing table so that the jut of the oak pressed into the backs of her thighs, and as she did, she bit down on the inside of her cheek, folded her arms across her chest and pulled her cardigan tighter around her. She continued to study him, whilst he continued to avoid her. Oppo might be the last refuge of a scoundrel, and two wrongs never made a right—no more than two negatives would add up to give a positive—but using oppo to save her career, to protect her family, to stop her shame being splashed across the press…?

Perhaps it made her a worse person to admit it, and certainly far less moral than she'd like to consider herself, but in a way, it added up, or she let it add up—just this once—all whilst telling herself that it didn't matter what she thought anyway. After all, done was done. Part of her was grateful that she could hide behind that. "So… He quit?"

Russell nodded. "Resigned last week."

"Right…" She lifted the wad of photographs from the dressing table and sank down onto the stool again. "Well, I guess that's that."

The silence between them strained, tautened by the words they didn't say, the argument they could have had as they both tried to convince themselves that the other wasn't in some way right. Yet somehow the silence said it all: he did feel guilty for using oppo, even if his motivations were justified, and she couldn't bring herself to hold it against him, even if she'd never admit otherwise.

Slowly, the tension eased. Elizabeth continued to study the images one at a time. The crisp rasp of paper curling over paper echoed into the room each time that she cycled a sheet to the back of the pile. She kept her focus on the cars, lest her attention be drawn to the images of her family and that undercurrent of guilt for putting them through this. "So… How is Stevie?"

Russell drew in a long breath. His gaze turned distant and then more distant still as he turned his head from side to side and the light reflected off the lenses of his glasses. "Stevie's…Stevie."

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed on him for a moment before she returned her attention to the photographs. "See, my definition of Stevie is probably nothing like your definition of Stevie, so telling me that Stevie's Stevie really isn't that helpful."

The corner of his lips tweaked into a sorry smile. "I think it's fair to say she's not your number one fan right now."

Elizabeth paused. She stared past him, towards the chinks of yellow light that crept through the privacy slats of the window set into the door. Her lips flinched, a kind of shrug, and she lowered her gaze back to the photographs. "Yeah, well, I probably deserve that."

"Give her time, she'll come round."

"I don't know." A breath bound the top of her chest. "If I was her and I had to watch my mother go from secretary of state and potential president to that—" She motioned vaguely towards the photograph on the bed. "—I'd hate me too."

"You know, you can wallow in guilt all you like, but it won't get you anywhere."

She gave an empty huff of a laugh. "See, I think that's what Dr Sherman would like to say to me, if only she'd be more direct."

The next photograph showed Stevie storming away from the front porch, her face twisted into an angry pout, hot tears filling her eyes, whilst she clung so tight to the straps of the paisley pattern canvas bag that hung from her shoulder that her knuckles blanched to ghostly white. _God, I can't do this, Stevie. _This time Elizabeth couldn't avoid the wrenching twist of guilt, as though the look on Stevie's face snagged at what Henry might call her soul. Maybe if she'd said something more that day; maybe if she'd told Henry exactly what was going on in her mind when he'd insisted that she talk; maybe then she would've gotten help sooner and things needn't have unfolded the way that they did. Just another opportunity missed. But part of her knew it wasn't for lack of trying that the words had failed to come; she had told him what she was thinking the only way she could. She had tried. So many times she had tried. And part of her still wished she'd never said anything at all, that somehow she could have found a way to bury it all until Will woke up and maybe then it would have disappeared on its own. Though, of course, that was the same part of her that had insisted she was fine, that had urged her to leave, that had coaxed her straight into the path of the flashback and panic attack. _Trust no one, Bess._ It made sense now, when Conrad had told her that some days he didn't even trust himself.

She turned the photograph to the bottom of the pile, and shot a glance at Russell. "Does she know that you're here? Stevie."

"Trying to keep her out of the loop as much as possible."

"Worried that she'll tell her father?"

Russell raised his eyebrows, as though he were pondering both the question and what Henry's reaction might be if he were to find out. It looked as though he were staring into an abyss, one he definitely did not want to see the bottom of. "Well, I've managed to convince her that omission isn't a sin, but I think outright lying might be a step too far."

She stared at him. "Russell Jackson, are you trying to morally corrupt my daughter?"

"I wouldn't have to if you didn't set such high standards."

"Well, I apologise that Henry and I wanted to raise our children to be decent human beings."

"I'm not saying leave them feral—" Russell tossed one hand up. "Just let them know that some situations require a little room to manoeuvre."

"Well, I assure you, they all lie when sufficiently motivated. Even the ethics professor lies, only then he gets a heavy dose of Catholic guilt and feels the need to confess."

And there was nothing quite so forlorn as Henry coming to her and admitting, _Babe, I'm sorry…I lied,_ as though he'd just taken a shotgun to a barrel of puppies. That look alone was perhaps why it was nigh on impossible for her to stay mad at him, as hard as she tried; it didn't stop her from keeping up the pretence though, just for a little bit. At the thought, a soft smile warmed her lips, but it quickly turned cold as the look on Henry's face warped into the one he had worn when she'd told him, _I'm sorry that I lied_. She hadn't wanted to hurt him, yet she'd hurt him all the same.

She shook the thought away and looked up at Russell. "But you're keeping an eye on her?"

"If you tell her I said that, I'll say that you're delusional. Shouldn't be too hard to convince anyone of that." He gestured to the room around them, as though to encompass all of the clinic and her lapse from rational thinking in general. But then he met her eye, and his expression softened. "You're doing well, Bess. Keep it up and there's no reason why you can't put that—" He nodded to the photograph on the bed. "—behind you."

She stared down at the next photograph—Kat and Jay, the collars of their overcoats flipped up as they hurried towards the house through the drizzle lit by the amber haze of street lamps—and her eyebrows arched. "It doesn't undo what's happened though."

"Nothing ever does."

She shuffled the page to the back, and then stopped. Her pulse lurched into double time. A grey three-door hatchback, with blacked out rear windows and a busted front bumper patched up with a nest of duct tape. She jabbed one finger at the car. "That's it." She thrust the photograph at Russell. "That's the car."

"You're positive?"

"Absolutely."

Russell examined it. His tone dragged. "Right, well, I'll have them circulate the details tonight, see if we can't track it down." He gathered up the rest of the photographs and stuffed them into the file, keeping the image of the car at the top. He rose from the seat, grabbed his overcoat from the back of the chair, and as he strode towards the door, he slung the coat over his forearm.

"You know," Elizabeth said, "if this does turn out to be a lead, perhaps you ought to thank Carlos Morejon for spying on my house."

Russell shot her a look as he jammed the doorstop back into place. "Don't push it."

Then his gaze drifted to the bed, to the one photograph that remained.

Elizabeth picked it up and looked it over one last time. No. It wasn't her. Not anymore. Even if she still wasn't quite herself. She held it out to Russell. "Destroy it."

He eyed the image. Then his gaze flicked back to her. "If I do that, you've got to promise that you won't go back."

"Deal."

He studied her for a moment, as though performing a mental polygraph.

And whatever the outcome, she felt as though she could trust it more than she trusted herself.

But then he nodded, took the photograph and added it to the folder, and then strode towards the door again. Centred beneath the pale oak frame, he stopped. He turned his chin to his shoulder, not quite meeting her eye. "What Dr Sherman ought to tell you, but won't, is that the guilt never truly goes away. So, you can either learn to live with it, or you can learn to use it. Your choice." He tapped the file against his side. "Take care of yourself, Bess."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**More E (and a hint of H) tomorrow.**


	55. Chapter Fifty-Three: triggers

**Note**: I'm glad you liked the previous chapter. I wasn't sure about it and I didn't know if it would connect.

* * *

**Chapter Fifty-Three**

**…****triggers.**

**Elizabeth**

**Saturday, 1st December, 2018**

**12:59 PM**

A growl rumbled out from Elizabeth's stomach. She dropped the biro down onto the open pages of the therapy file that rested atop the dressing table in her room, pushed up the sleeve of her cardigan, and glanced at her watch.

Only, it wasn't there.

You'd think that after three weeks of staying at the clinic she'd have gotten used to not wearing it, but every time she sought out the hour, she looked to her bare wrist and received the same blow to the solar plexus. At first it had been a jolt of shame, a reminder that she had allowed herself to end up in a place where she couldn't be trusted with something as basic as shoelaces, a belt or even a watch. Then it had morphed into a pang of guilt, a reminder of the words Henry had said when he first fastened the leather strap into place. _Here's a promise: I'll always find time for you and the kids._ Which itself held a reminder that since the incident she'd found no time for him or the kids at all; she'd distanced herself from them as she sunk into an ocean of numb, and when Henry had tried to reach her, she'd lashed out, sometimes to protect him, sometimes to protect herself, sometimes for no fathomable reason at all.

Now the absence held something deeper than that, like a shot of ice to the core—a chill of loss. It was a reminder of the watch her father had once worn, the one the police claimed had been lost in the crash. Though, even at fifteen, she knew what that meant: Someone had stolen it. It meant nothing to them, just some cash on the side, though whatever they got for it, she would have offered them double, treble, if not more. Because it wasn't just a watch; it was part of her father. It was the base note of his scent; it was a piece of his history; it was a memory he shared with his children; it was his proof that it really was their bedtime; it was his collateral at the gas station when he forgot his wallet; it was his conversation starter at dinner parties; it was his kitchen timer when making coq au vin; it was his compass when teaching them survival skills; it was his promise to them that they had all the time in the world. And when that time stopped…? It was his relic. Something worth more to her than anything her inheritance could buy.

He would never have willingly parted with that watch. Now, for her to be without its twin, the distance between herself and her father gaped wider than ever before. Three weeks ought to have been long enough to adjust to not wearing her watch, but not even thirty-five years could come close to being enough time to adjust to not having her father.

She pulled her cardigan sleeve down and hid the bare skin of her wrist beneath the itch of wool, though the tug of emptiness lingered inside. She folded the cover shut on the therapy file, with the biro still trapped between its pages, twisted around in her seat and peered up at the clock that hung over the door. Lunch. Her stomach growled in agreement. Though, the voice of her appetite had quietened a little compared to moments before.

With her toes curling into and gripping the ends of the slack-tongued sneakers, she ambled along the corridor. Sunlight filtered in through the row of windows, and though the rays lacked any true warmth, it was more than made up for by the line of steel radiators that pumped their fug into the hall until the air felt thick enough to touch, like walking through a cloud of heat. It made each breath feel stale and empty. Or maybe that was still the thoughts of her father.

Henry had said that the whole situation—the prospect of losing Will—reminded her of the loss of her parents, and in a way he was right. But in truth, so many things did. With a trauma like the poisoning or what happened in Iran, she could draw up a list of specific triggers and she could learn how to cope, but grief… Grief could arise out of anything or nothing, grief could be found in the spaces between thoughts, grief felt like an undercurrent that coursed beneath everything she did in life. Sometimes the undertow was no more than a trickle, only perceptible if she held it in focus, but at other times, it swept everything else away and she couldn't resist being dragged in by its tug.

* * *

**1988**

Over the course of the day, a hazy fug had built up in the living room. Maple wood crackled and popped in the fireplace; it filled the air with a swell of warmth and smoke. Heat wafted through from the kitchen, along with the aroma of butter-basted chicken and fat-crisped potatoes. And then there were the voices of the McCords, which grew louder and louder, the laughter more and more raucous, as they competed to be heard over one another, until the noise echoed off the ceiling and pressed down upon Elizabeth where she had tucked herself into the corner of what was surely meant to be a three—not five—seater couch, an aching smile fixed to her face, whilst it felt as though, at any second, something inside her might collapse.

Initially, the intention had been to visit at Christmas, but the 'flu had other plans, so she and Henry had driven up a few weeks later instead, and though most of her knew it was probably for the best that she meet Henry's family without Will being there to create an impression that they'd never forget, part of her found herself wishing that he was there now regardless of what he might have done or said. Had he been there, they probably would have slipped away an hour or so ago to perch side by side on the cold stone steps leading up to the porch, their breath fogging before them and billowing up into the crisp night air as they shared sips from a bottle of beer he would no doubt have filched from the refrigerator, and they would have laughed—if a little bitterly—at the snide comments Henry's father and sister had made about their upbringing and their background, their horses and their boarding school, their money and their social class. But instead, she found herself crammed into the corner of the couch, at the edge of a room stuffed full of McCords, engulfed in their chatter and their jarring laughter, utterly invisible and utterly alone.

She squeezed Henry's thigh and waited the ten seconds, or maybe ten minutes, it took for him to finish talking to Shane and twist around. When his gaze landed on her, he almost looked surprised to see her, as though he'd forgotten that she had been there all along.

His smile dimmed a fraction. "Okay, babe?"

She leant in until the scent of the beer on his breath tingled in her nose, hot and heady, and she brought her lips close to his ear so that he'd hear her over his family's shouts. "I'm getting tired, so I thought I might head up."

"You sure?" He glanced at his watch. "It's only just gone eight."

"Long drive."

"Okay," he said, but he gave her an uncertain look. "I'll show you to my room."

"No, you stay, I can manage." She forced her smile even wider, though in doing so it felt like it might fracture, and she pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek. "I'll see you in the morning, okay?"

Before he could protest or ask any questions, she squeezed out of the gap between him and the arm of the couch, and though she had intended to say goodnight to his family, just like she always had done with her parents before she retreated to study in her room, none of them so much as glanced up as she moved, and so she slipped out of the door in silence and into the shadows of the hall.

The air in the corridor was crisp after the heat of the living room, and though still tainted by the chatter that spilled out through the gap in the doorway, the quietness hummed. She drew in a breath as she pinched her eyes shut, but her chest clenched around it, and on the exhale, it shook. She had to get out of there, she had to—

"Babe."

At Henry's voice and the light touch of his hand on her hip, she flinched.

"You sure you're okay?"

She blinked her eyes open, blinked away the sting, and gave a firm nod. "Fine." Then she fixed her smile back in place and turned to face him. "Just a bit headachey, that's all."

A frown settled across his brow as he studied her eyes. It looked as though he wanted to believe her, that he was searching for a speck of truth that he could latch onto. Whether he found it or not, she couldn't be sure, but perhaps to trust her was preferable to the alternative. "Okay. Well, I'll check on you when I come up."

"And get in trouble with your parents?" She arched an eyebrow at him. Whatever their relationship involved at college, there were still rules in the McCord household. She eased half a step closer, bringing them toe to toe, and then she slid her hands up his chest until her fingertips danced over his neck. She nuzzled his nose and brushed her lips against his, just the hint at a kiss before she drew back. "I'll see you in the morning."

"Ah-hem." Maureen's voice came from the doorway, and cut between them. "This is a corridor not a kissing booth. If Elizabeth's having trouble finding her room, I suggest you try giving her directions rather than pointing her there with your tongue."

Elizabeth backed away a step, her gaze locked on Henry's. She resisted an eye roll and offered him a soft smile instead. "Goodnight." Then she looked beyond him, to Maureen stood in the doorway with her arms folded firmly across her chest. "Goodnight, Maureen."

No response. Just a scowl.

She'd expected as much, yet somehow it sharpened the ache that already rippled inside her; they were family, she was not. The ache only deepened step by step as she ascended the stairs into the darkness of the landing, so much so that she couldn't be sure if the chill came from the air or if it was part of herself. Perhaps it radiated from her, a kind of signal that warned people off. Perhaps it pushed them away, and destined her to forever be alone. And hadn't Will told her, '_You're an Adams, first and foremost_'? But for a while, it would have been nice to forget; for a while, it would have been nice to remember what it felt like to be part of a family.

The moment Henry's bedroom door shuddered shut behind her, the part of her she'd been fighting to hold up all day collapsed. It felt as though her whole body had caved in, and the tremors it triggered shook through her in hitched-breathed sobs. She buried her face in the crook of her arm and blundered her way towards the wicker chair in the corner. The room was swathed in shadows, but they were nothing compared to the darkness that swarmed inside her. It was stupid. Her parents had died years ago, more than enough time to adjust. The pain should lessen with time, or so people said. Yet the wound was determined to reopen, and each time that it did, it stung with as much rawness as it had at first, in the months after that initial numbness had lapsed. She ought to pull herself together, to stop bawling like a little girl missing her mom and dad, but with the lilt of laughter and the buzz of voices that echoed up through the floorboards and with the adolescence preserved in the certificates and posters on Henry's bedroom walls, she felt as lonely as she had done that first night she'd been forced to stay at Aunt Joan's house, with none of her possessions, no words let alone anyone to share them with, and no place that she could call home. And perhaps it would have been tolerable, if only everything around her didn't act like a mirror for the family, home, childhood that she had lost.

Hours had passed when the gentle _rap-tap_ scuffed against the door. Scrunched-up balls of tissues littered the floor around the wicker chair where Elizabeth still sat, her knees hugged to her chest, whilst her head pounded from crying so much that the tears had eventually given up.

The door eased open, and a sliver of yellow light crept through as Henry poked his head inside. Elizabeth held her breath and willed him to miss the fact that she was huddled in the corner of the room rather than snuggled beneath the covers of his single bed.

But his gaze found her—and the tissues—and his expression dropped. "Elizabeth…" He stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind him with a muffled thud.

"I'm okay." She shook her head, sending her brain slamming into her skull, and she stooped down, picked up the tissues and tossed them into the small mesh bin beneath the desk.

"No, you're not." He knelt down in front of her and stared up into her eyes. "You're crying."

"I was crying. I've stopped now."

"I knew something was wrong." He smoothed his palms along the outside of her thighs and then back to her knees, the touch rough through her jeans. "I'm sorry about Maureen, and about my dad. What they said—"

"It's not that." Their comments hadn't helped, but she knew better than to admit that; to do so would only create a rift, either between him and them or between him and herself, and she'd never let herself be the reason for the former and she couldn't bear to think about the latter.

"Then…?"

Her face crumpled, as though trying to squeeze out more tears, but they'd all dried up. "I miss them, Henry. I know it's stupid—"

"Hey. It's not stupid. Come here." He pulled her up from the seat, and she stumbled forward into his arms, too exhausted to resist. He cradled her head to his shoulder and stroked her hair whilst her fists bunched his tee at his waist. He kissed her crown. "It's okay for you to miss them, and it's okay if you're not okay."

With her lips moving against the crook of his neck, the words came out muffled. "I don't want to ruin your weekend with your family. And I don't want to be the girl crying in your room."

"You're not ruining my weekend my family. And I happen to be quite fond of the girl crying in my room." He pulled back and tucked her hair behind her ear. Then he cupped her cheek and drew her gaze up to his. "Elizabeth…your parents…they're your family, and I never want you to feel like you have to hide them or how you feel about them from me."

"I just wish it didn't still hurt so much."

He gave her a sorry smile. "Me too."

She nestled against him again and soaked up his warmth whilst he smoothed his hand over her back and calmed the breaths that still quivered in her chest. How long they stayed like that, she didn't know, and no matter how long it was, it would never be enough. When she had told Will that meeting Henry's parents felt too soon, it had only been a half-truth; she knew how she felt about Henry, but in taking that step and acknowledging the path they were heading down, it made it real, and it felt as though she were setting herself up for another loss. And she'd never be ready for that.

She pulled back, but kept hold of Henry's waist, her gaze fixed on the rise and fall of his chest. "You should probably go. I don't want you getting in trouble."

"I'm not leaving you."

She looked up at him. "Henry, I'm pretty sure your family already hate me, I don't want them thinking I'm some kind of Jezebel luring you in here for sex."

"They don't hate you."

She arched an eyebrow at him.

"Mom, Erin and Shane like you." He shrugged. "Dad and Maureen will come round."

"Still, I don't want you breaking the rules for me."

"I'll break every rule there is for you." He fixed that thought with a firm look, and then stepped back and grabbed the pyjamas from the top of the bag that sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. He tossed them at her. "Put these on and come to bed."

"Henry…"

He gave her another look, one that invited no protest. "I'm not leaving you."

That night as he held her, his arm slung over her waist and gathering her against him to stop her from tumbling over the edge of the single bed, she tried to convince herself that he had told her the truth, that he wouldn't leave her, that this was it now, that she'd never be alone again. But she knew that too often leaving the ones you loved wasn't a choice you got to make. And with each of his breaths rising against her back and fanning in a hot ruffle across her neck, she knew that alone wasn't always something you were, but something you felt, and as much as she wanted to believe that surrounding herself in him would protect her, she knew that no amount of warmth provided by another could shield her from the chill that arose from inside herself.

* * *

**Present Day**

Elizabeth strode down the last step and into the corridor that led towards reception and the dining room beyond, careful not to trip as the heels of her sneakers flapped away from her soles. She pushed her palms into the door and forced it open with a whoosh, and as she did, her cardigan sleeve slipped down, just enough to reveal the bare skin of her wrist once more. Trauma triggers were held in the things she could hear, see, smell, taste and touch. But grief…? Grief was held in the remembrance of the things she could not. The absence of a hug, a laugh, her mother's scent, her father's watch.

"Elizabeth. There you are." Russell stood in reception, at the end of the row of chairs. His usual uniform of suit and tie had been swapped for jeans and a dark blue plaid shirt.

"Russell." Elizabeth frowned, and she hugged the fronts of her cardigan around her. She motioned down the corridor. "I was just heading to lunch."

"Not today you're not."

"But—"

"You're having lunch with me."

"Oh."

Russell grabbed the sheer plastic bag and the manila file that rested atop the end seat, and then beckoned her to follow him as he strode along the hallway that led to the therapy rooms. At her hesitation, he turned and paced backwards for a couple of steps. "I've already cleared it with Dr Sherman, so you won't be getting any demerits. Now, hurry up."

* * *

Russell placed the bag down on the glass coffee table in the middle of the therapy room, and then pulled out two bottles of mineral water and two pale yellow polystyrene takeaway boxes. He set a wooden fork atop each box, and then eased the table closer to the couch and sank down onto the cushions. He met her with an expectant look. "Well, sit down then."

But Elizabeth remained near the door. Frozen. The aroma of garlic, slow-simmered tomatoes and the sweetness of basil leaked out from the cartons and lilted through the air. It hit her like a blow to the stomach, knocked aside any remnants of hunger, and caused the edges of her vision to haze into a black prickle of stars. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. "Is that…?"

"Yes." Russell popped open the lid on his box. Ribbons of pappardelle were curled into a nest and coated in béchamel bolognese sauce.

The stars worked their way into her fingers and toes. Her muscles screamed at her to run, but everything seized tight, rapt in adrenaline's paralytic thrall.

Russell looked at her, and his gaze flicked up and down as though he were sizing her up. "You're going to eat it, and you're going to be fine, because I can't have you curled up in the foetal position when all this red meat and cream gives me another heart attack."

She shook her head. "Russell—"

"Take a breath."

She frowned. "What?"

"Breathe. You know, that thing you do to stop yourself from passing out." Russell wound a length of pappardelle around his fork and stuffed it into his mouth.

She took a breath, and the tightness that had wrapped around her lungs and throat relaxed. Though she hadn't realised it, she must have been holding her breath, for now the air rushed in and the rise and fall of her chest quickened in a bid to catch up.

"Good." Russell mopped the pasta through the sauce. "Now, what's the same?"

She paused, and for a second, her frown deepened. _The same_?

When she said nothing, he raised his gaze to hers again. "Out loud. Unless you plan on avoiding pasta for the rest of your life."

She folded her arms across her chest. _This was so not happening_.

But Russell continued to watch her. "I'm waiting."

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "The smell of the sauce, it's the same meal, I'm guessing the taste's the same, the time of day's the same too…" Her fingers flared where they peeked from beneath her elbow. "Do we really have to do this?"

Russell unscrewed the cap from his bottle of water; the plastic snapped as the seal broke. "I'd rather you just sat down and ate." He took a swig. "Differences."

"Well, I'm hoping this batch isn't poisoned." She paced towards the couch and slumped down onto the cushions. The tingling in her fingers and toes had diffused, along with that initial surge of panic. Had Russell not told her to breathe, perhaps it would have taken over. Perhaps it still might. She shook her head to herself and lifted the lid on her own takeaway box. "You know, I never thought that one day I'd be processing triggers with the White House Chief of Staff."

"Technically, you still haven't given me the differences."

She twisted around to look at him. "You mean flippancy isn't a valid response?"

"Not if you end up losing yourself in a flashback or having another panic attack." He washed a mouthful down with a swig of water. When he placed the bottle back on the table, the plastic crackled beneath his touch.

"I haven't had any flashbacks, not since that night, and I'm not going to have a panic attack, not right now anyway." She probed the pasta with her fork. "The smell caught me off guard, that's all."

"That's generally how it works." He eyed her for a moment, his gaze like pinpricks over her cheek. "Dr Sherman said you were managing your symptoms, but if this is too much—"

She shook her head. "I can manage, I just need a moment."

It was just pasta. It might look the same, smell the same, taste the same, but it wasn't the same. It didn't contain diasiozin, it wouldn't lead to Will fitting, it wouldn't cause her to collapse.

_He's not breathing. Matt, he's not breathing. He's not breathing._

She dropped the fork and smoothed her hands down along her jeans; the denim grated against her clammy palms. She cleared her throat. "So, what's happening with the car?"

In the pause, Russell's gaze continued to prickle against her, as subtle yet as harsh as the sound of gravel churning beneath tyres in the car park beyond the blind-shuttered window, and like the sound, it crawled through her skin and smarted against already frayed nerves.

She leant forward, snatched up her own bottle of water, and twisted off the cap. She raised the bottle to her lips and shot him a glance.

Russell paused for a second longer, and then broke his gaze away from hers. He stooped forward and raked his fork through his dish of pasta where it balanced atop the coffee table. "Well, we spoke to the photographer Morejon hired, but apparently he was too busy trying not to be caught by DS to notice anything. We checked DS's reports, but there was nothing in there about the car…but then again, they failed to notice the photographer so that hardly instils any confidence." His eyebrows raised a fraction and his gaze took on a faraway fog. "I'm beginning to wonder if they'd notice a hydrogen bomb going off." He shook away the look, and scooped a forkful of sauce into his mouth. "The FBI spoke to your brother again too, but according to him, normal people don't spend their lives in a haze of paranoia thinking that they're being followed."

"Huh." Elizabeth gave an abrupt laugh. Definitely a jibe at her. Then her expression softened. "How is Will?"

"Walking and talking. Due to be discharged on Monday."

"Good."

Russell turned to her. "He's a total moron though."

Elizabeth paused, the water bottle halfway to her lips. "Why?"

"The FBI were trying to figure out how someone gained access to his cell phone. Turns out he leaves it in his locker while he's at work."

"Nothing wrong with that."

"Not unless you couple it with the fact that he was using a combination lock and—"

"Let me guess… The combination was nineteen-seventy, same as his passcode."

"Doesn't exactly take a master safecracker to get into that."

She shook her head to herself, and then glanced back to Russell. "What about CCTV?"

"Doesn't go back that far."

"But the FBI suspect someone was using him to get to me?"

"Looks that way." Russell lifted the polystyrene tray from the table, and held it level to his chest as he scooped up the last of the sauce. He spoke through his mouthful. "We've assigned him a small security detail, just in case, but he's not having any of it."

"Of course he's not." Knowing Will, he'd see any kind of protection as an affront to his freedom, not something designed to keep him safe and alive.

She stared across the room towards the window beyond the pair of armchairs, where the sunlight shot around the edges of the blind. Vague shadows danced across the fabric. The limbs of the black walnut tree perhaps. She raised the water bottle for a sip. _Fly or fall?_

She stopped, lowered the bottle to her knee once more, and twisted around to face Russell. "You need to insist—"

"You don't think we thought of that?"

"If you'd just let me finish." She arched an eyebrow at him and waited for him to hold to his silence before she continued. "Insist that he has a detail, tell him that it's for his own safety and lay the risks on thick. He'll rail against it, but keep on insisting. Then, when he finally brings up civil liberties and the Constitution, remind him that he won't have any civil liberties if he's dead."

"And that'll work?"

"No. He's a narcissist, he thinks death's beneath him." She brushed the comment aside and then returned her gaze to Russell's. Her eyes narrowed a fraction. "But then, when he starts talking about lawyers, that's when you back down—reluctantly. Remind him once again of all the risks and say that the offer remains open."

"You think he'll come around?"

"And admit that he was wrong? Never." She shook her head. "No, but once he thinks that he's won, you can assign him plainclothes officers and keep an eye on him that way." She shrugged and took a sip of water. "As he said, what normal person thinks that they're being followed?"

Russell gave a huff and tossed the empty carton onto the table, the fork stranded amongst the remaining streaks of orange sauce. "If I were you, I'd leave him to it."

"Someone's got to protect him from himself." She placed the bottle of water down by her feet, and picked up her fork again. She toyed with the pasta and lifted up a ribbon, only to let it fall a moment or so later. It wasn't the same, the rich scent had blunted, it wouldn't harm her.

"Anyway, back to the car." Russell grabbed the manila file that rested at the edge of the coffee table. "MPD lucked out. The plates were stolen, car probably was too, but they found it driving around Brentwood in the early hours of Friday morning."

Elizabeth set the fork down and took the piece of paper that Russell passed her. A mugshot filled the upper left-hand corner. She frowned down at the picture. Male, Caucasian, possibly late thirties—a glance to the personal details on the right confirmed that. Then she shook her head, and her gaze flicked back to Russell. "I don't recognise him."

"I wouldn't expect you to. He's got a history of burglary—" He pointed to the list of convictions beneath the mugshot. "—no particular reason to want you dead, assuming he even knows who you are to begin with, and more importantly, an alibi."

"So, the FBI don't think it's related? That he was just casing the neighbourhood?"

Russell shrugged. "He claims he's never been near Georgetown, that he found the car abandoned with the keys inside."

She snorted. "What? And he thought he'd return it to its rightful owner?"

Russell took the piece of paper from her and slipped it back inside the file. "Forensics pulled the car apart. Fingerprints show it's basically a Petri dish for DC lowlifes."

"So, one of them was casing the neighbourhood instead?" She massaged her brow as she shook her head to herself. The car was meant to be their lead, it was meant to help them catch whoever did this so that she and her family would be safe, not just dredge up shady characters looking to rob one of her neighbours.

"Possibly." Russell rose to his feet. On the coffee table, he laid out ten or so rap sheets, each as extensive as the next. He twisted around to face her. "But that doesn't explain why forensics found a plastic vial stuck in the tracks of the driver's seat. One guess as to what it contained."

Elizabeth's hand fell back to her lap. Her eyes widened. "Diasiozin."

"Bingo." He gestured to the array of photographs. "The FBI are rounding them all up, but obviously, if you recognise any of them, it would help move things along."

She stooped forward and examined the photographs one by one, along with their list of charges. Criminal possession of a weapon. DUI. Affray. Aggravated assault. Drug offences. Burglary. Armed robbery. Car theft… But none of photographs kindled any kind of recognition.

"Should I be concerned that these people are skulking around my neighbourhood?"

"Well, there's a nice piece of real estate up for grabs on Pennsylvania Avenue, if you're thinking about moving."

Elizabeth shot Russell a look. _So not the time or place to be discussing that._

But then she froze. A jolt of ice spread through her core. "Him."

Russell frowned at her, and then down at the form in his hand, the picture of a young man—maybe mid to late twenties—paper-clipped to the corner. "This guy? He's a Bulgarian med student here on a student visa. Forensics got a hit on his prints through immigration records, but the FBI think he might be the original owner."

"Then what was he doing serving me and my brother at the restaurant where we happened to be poisoned using the same drug that happened to be found in a car that his fingerprints happened to be pulled from?"

Russell studied her. "You're certain?"

She nodded. "Absolutely."

"Right—" He raised his eyebrows at the photograph. "Well, I'll let the FBI know."

He gathered up the rap sheets, jostled them together, and returned them to the file. Then he took a step as though to skirt around the edge of the coffee table and head towards the door, but his gaze fell to the takeaway box still filled with the béchamel bolognese, and he paused.

He looked to Elizabeth. "Look…if you want me to get you something else—"

"No." Elizabeth picked up the carton and held it balanced in one palm. She stared down into the reams of pasta stained golden with the licks of béchamel and the meaty tomato sauce. It wasn't the same. It didn't contain diasiozin. It couldn't harm her.

Yet the silence stretched until it whined.

Russell sank down into the armchair opposite. He ran one hand over his head and scratched at the back, his shoulders rising with tension. "After the fishing trip with my brother, it took me years until I was ready to eat campfire trout again, and it's still something I'd rather not deal with, even now. So, if you're not ready to eat that yet, it's not a failure. You can always try again another day."

She raked the fork over the pasta. "Lasagne is one of Henry's go-to dishes, so if I can't eat what's essentially the deconstructed version of that, we're gonna have a problem."

"Could give him the opportunity to expand his repertoire."

She gave a hollow laugh.

Russell shrugged. "As I said, there's always another day."

"And there's always another excuse." She lifted half a forkful to her lips. It wasn't the same. It didn't contain diasiozin. It couldn't harm her. It wasn't the same. It didn't contain diasiozin. It couldn't harm her. It wasn't the same. It didn't contain diasiozin. It couldn't harm her. It wasn't—

Russell braced himself against the arms of the chair and pushed himself to his feet.

She stopped, and looked across to him. "Russell?"

He halted, midway up from the seat.

"Stay?"

He paused. His gaze flicked over her. The whites of his eyes held a hint of surprise at first. But then he nodded, and the look he gave her now said that he understood, that he had been there before, that in this feeling she wasn't alone. He sank back onto the armchair, and they settled into silence. Though he opened up the manila file and peered down at the pages, his gaze continued to dart up to her every few seconds or so.

She took a bite, at first just the sauce. She kept her gaze fixed on the glass coffee table and noted how a shard of sunlight reflected off the surface; she focused on that as the taste of cream-thickened tomatoes flooded her mouth. She took another bite, this time with some of the pasta too. Outside, footsteps crunched and rasped over the gravel; she focused on that as the béchamel-slick pappardelle slithered down her throat. Another bite. Beneath her, the leather cushion sagged, soft and yielding, not like the firm seats of the restaurant booth; she focused on that as the scent of garlic filled her nose. Another bite. Beyond the window, birds warbled and cooed, not like the asynchronous clatter that had echoed up into the vaulted ceiling of the dining room; she focused on that rather than the threading thud of her own pulse.

Bite by bite, anchor by anchor, she made it through, and though her hunger had long since fled, she forced herself to eat it all, until only the smear of sauce coating the carton remained.

"How was it?" Russell asked as she chewed over her last mouthful.

"All right." She nodded, and she poked the last pieces of ground beef free from her teeth using the tip of her tongue. She paused. Then she tilted her head to one side, and she couldn't resist the subtle smile that tugged at the corners of her lips. "I mean, I wouldn't say it was to die for…"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Perhaps not the hint of H you were hoping for, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. : )**


	56. Chapter Fifty-Four: Russell's pasta i

**Note**: Thank you for your reviews! I appreciate you taking the time to leave comments and feedback, or just letting me know that you're still reading. Please keep them coming!

* * *

**Chapter Fifty-Four**

**…****Russell's pasta idea has a part two.**

**Elizabeth**

**2:13 PM**

"I hear that Russell ambushed you with the pasta." Dr Sherman met Elizabeth with a somewhat wary smile as she sat in the armchair across from her, her hands folded atop the notebook in her lap.

Elizabeth gave a half-nod. "He did."

Though Russell had taken the empty cartons with him when he had left to use the phone in the office, having once more complained about the lack of signal at the clinic, the scent of garlic and the sweet acidity of tomatoes still hung over the therapy room.

Dr Sherman's eyebrows raised, and the slight shake of her head, along with the tone of her voice, signalled her disapproval—though her expression held a touch of resignation too. "He was meant to give you a warning first."

"Well, that certainly would have been preferable." Elizabeth took a sip of water from her bottle, now half-drained, and then rested the bottle against her knee. The plastic pressed a chill through her jeans. "But then again, it's not like there's going be someone there to warn me before each reminder that I encounter."

"Still, there's a fine line between exposure that helps you to deal with unavoidable triggers and exposure that places you at risk of strengthening the negative associations your mind has already built."

"He meant well." Elizabeth gave a soft smile, and then shrugged. "And he knows I like a challenge." Though she'd take whipping votes in the Senate over Russell Jackson's idea of therapy any day. "I'm not sure what he would've done if it had backfired though."

"That's why a counsellor was meant to be present too."

Elizabeth paused with the water bottle halfway to her lips. "See, he forgot to mention that."

"I'm sure he did." Dr Sherman shook her head like an exasperated teacher dealing with her incorrigible student. Then her smile brightened again, though it remained a touch strained, and she returned to Elizabeth. "Anyway. How did you find it? Confronting the pasta?"

"_Confronting the pasta_?" Elizabeth snorted. "Sounds like something the kids would say if I ever made carbonara."

Dr Sherman held Elizabeth's gaze in a way that said she wouldn't back down until she'd received a proper response; though, having worked with Russell, she was probably more than prepared for patients who used flippancy as their go-to defence.

Elizabeth took a breath, and then, after a couple of seconds, she huffed it out. "Panicky at first…but I think the surreality of Russell Jackson talking me down took the edge off."

"And if you were to have it again, how do you think you'd feel?"

"It might not be my first choice for a while, but I think I'd cope."

"Good." Dr Sherman's gaze lingered on Elizabeth for a moment, and then she prised back the cover of her notebook and used the navy blue ribbon tucked inside to lift up the pages. "Now, while we're on the topic of unavoidable triggers, we spoke before about the car you were in when your brother first fell ill and how it would make you feel to confront that. You explained how that was part of what triggered your flashback, and I know that we've used imaginal exposure, but—"

"Let me guess." Elizabeth's voice held level, though her stomach felt like it was slowly succumbing to arctic waters. "Russell's pasta idea has a part two."

Dr Sherman gave her a taut smile. "Once you return to work, you'll need to be able to ride in the car every day without feeling panicked. When you decide to confront that is up to you."

"But you think I'm ready?"

"You've been doing well in our sessions, and in my opinion, yes. But it's how you feel and what you think you can tolerate at this point that's important."

The image of the backdoor opening and Will lying across the backseat—his body jerking, his mouth foaming with blood-tinged saliva, his lips grey-blue—stained the edges of Elizabeth's mind. It felt as though the pigments of the memory were ready to bleed across her vision, their colours drawn towards the centre by capillary action, until they blinded her from the present and trapped her in their haze. _Confronting_ the car could trigger that, it could see her spiralling through time. But Dr Sherman was right: if she couldn't cope with sitting in that car each day, she wouldn't be able to go back to work. And, more importantly, if she was still having to resort to avoidance as a way to cope, it would signal that she wasn't anywhere near ready to go home. And she _ached_ to go home.

The knock at the door jarred her from her thoughts. Russell stood on the other side of the narrow rectangle of glass that was set into the wood. He waited until Dr Sherman twisted around and motioned for him to enter before he pressed down the handle and pushed open the door.

Elizabeth looked to Dr Sherman whilst she tipped her finger in Russell's direction. "You know, I think that's the first time ever he's not just barged straight into a room."

"Yes." Dr Sherman's voice dragged slightly, and she turned back to face Elizabeth. "Let's just say we've had a conversation about that."

The door clunked shut. Russell raised his eyebrows at Elizabeth and tapped the manila file in his hand. "The FBI are on it. They'll read in the IC too."

"Good," Elizabeth said.

"Now—" He looked from Dr Sherman to Elizabeth and back again. "—is the field trip a go?"

The feeling that her stomach was sinking into ice cold water returned. Thinking about being back in the car and what had happened that day was one thing, but actually sitting in there, with the all the sights and smells and touch ready to catapult her back into the helpless certainty of death…?

Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad had it not led to a flashback last time, and if before that she hadn't been so convinced that she could cope. Therapy might be going well, or so she thought, but what if she fell apart again? What would that mean for her going forward? The aim was to get signed off and return home, not to find herself trapped at the clinic indefinitely, convinced that she was making progress, only to be confronted by the fact that, in reality, she was not.

Elizabeth offered Russell a smile. It was meant to be hopeful, but it tasted a touch grim. "Any chance Conrad could spare one of the Nighthawks instead?"

"I wasn't aware that your house had a helipad."

"Could be our next home improvement." She raised her shoulders, and the tension they held kept them bunched there; it felt as though they were hung on the hope that there really could be a way around it, one that didn't involve her getting in the car or facing up to the fact that perhaps she wasn't nearly half as ready to return to normal life as she'd thought.

Russell stared at her, hard. "Avoidance only makes it worse."

Her smile fractured and fell away in pieces. She lowered her gaze to the water bottle clutched in both hands, the plastic dented beneath her fingertips. He wasn't wrong. Avoidance might provide a temporary comfort, but that's what—

"Overthinking it will make it worse too." Russell's voice cut through that train of thought. He jerked his head towards the door. "Now, are you coming or not?"

Elizabeth looked to Dr Sherman, but Dr Sherman merely offered her a smile neutral enough to make the Swiss ambassador proud. "It's up to you."

"But if you don't do it now, it'll be even harder next time," Russell said. Then, when Dr Sherman twisted around to face him, leaving Elizabeth only to imagine the look that she gave him, he held his hands out wide. "What? Sugarcoating it's not going to get her anywhere…or at least not anywhere she needs to be."

"Elizabeth, this is your decision—" Dr Sherman began.

But Elizabeth shook her head and cut Dr Sherman off. "No. Russell's right."

"Thank you." Russell tossed one hand up.

"If you're sure." Dr Sherman kept to her neutral expression, but her tone held a cautious note.

Although her palms sweated against the water bottle, Elizabeth nodded. "I'll do it now."

* * *

Whilst Dr Sherman had disappeared to the office, apparently to inform whoever was on duty about the excursion—though Elizabeth held a sneaking suspicion she was telling them to line up a dose of sedative too—Russell and Elizabeth waited in the reception area.

"Stop pacing," Russell said, "before you wear a hole in the floor." He kept his gaze on the file balanced open in his palm whilst he perched against the arm of the chair at the end of the row.

Elizabeth stopped pacing the tract of mottled blue linoleum in front of him. With her hands on her hips, she turned to face him and then gestured towards the folder. "The waiter. He had a tattoo."

"So do a lot of people."

"On his wrist. A band of barbed wire with a band of what looked like bats a little lower down, all in black, with letters in between, possibly Cyrillic. I only had a glance, so I can't be sure."

Russell looked up from the file and stared at her. "Sounds pretty distinctive."

"I thought so."

Russell glanced behind him as the squeak of footsteps echoed down the corridor. He snapped the file shut and lowered his voice as he returned to Elizabeth. "We'll circulate the description through the IC, see if anyone has seen it before."

"Maybe contact INTERPOL too."

Dr Sherman tugged on a thick woollen cardigan as she strode into reception. "Ready?"

Elizabeth's stomach prickled. "Not even close."

Russell pushed himself away from his perch. "You'll be fine." Then he gave a stilted shrug. "And if you're not, what's the worst that can happen?"

Elizabeth's eyes bugged. _Seriously? What was the worst that could happen?_ "I could end up having a flashback or another panic attack, publicly humiliate myself _ah-gain_—" She swept one hand towards the space between the two sets of glass doors. "—then end up trapped here forever because I can't even get into a car, let alone make it through the whole drive back home. Then Conrad will have to fire me, my kids will spend the rest of their lives resenting me, and Henry will get tired of waiting for me and he'll divorce me and he'll find a new Mrs McCord." She pressed the back of her fist to her forehead, whilst her whole future unraveled before her.

"Elizabeth—" Dr Sherman warned.

"I'm catastrophising, I know." Elizabeth took a deep breath, held it there until it pushed outwards against her chest wall, and then she blew it out in a sharp rush. "I'm fine."

"If you have a flashback or panic attack, so what?" Russell gave another shrug.

Elizabeth shot him a sharp look. She'd throttle him if she could.

"It'll suck, but it's not like it's going to kill you."

"Well, it doesn't feel like that."

"Did you even consider the possibility that getting in the car might not be a problem at all?"

"If I did that, then I wouldn't be catastrophising."

"I'm going to call Director Doherty and ODNI." He tapped the folder against her elbow, and leant in towards her. "You're going to get in the car and be fine." His eyebrows arched and his stare seemed designed to fix that thought. "You ate the pasta, Bess. You can do this too."

Whilst the tread of Russell's footsteps disappeared down the corridor towards the office and the promise of a working phone, Elizabeth turned to Dr Sherman. "Okay, I think I prefer Snarky Russell. Positivity Russell is like The X-Files Barbie of the politics world."

Dr Sherman fought against her smile and motioned towards the glass door. "Shall we?"

"Let's get it over with." Elizabeth buried her hands in the ends of her sleeves, and hugged the fronts of her cardigan around her. She waited until Dr Sherman had punched in the code and the first door had slid aside, and then she followed her out into the space between the two mirrors and onto the concrete slabs beyond.

The black SUV waited on the opposite side of the car park, in front of the grassy island that split the track leading towards the clinic. The bare branches of the black walnut tree thrust high above the car like disjointed spider's limbs that crackled across the sky, fracturing it into blue shards that needled at her mind. Given the choice, the nightmare or a flashback, she didn't know which one she would prefer. Both unearthed a raw terror, both left her flailing and out of control.

"How are you feeling?" Dr Sherman asked.

"Like the pasta might soon make a reappearance." A chill shivered through Elizabeth, possibly sinking inwards from the biting air, possibly working its way outwards from her thoughts. She hugged her cardigan tighter around her and hoped that, either way, that would fend it off.

"Remember that this feeling will pass, just as it did in our sessions before. But if it feels too much, what can you do to help yourself in this moment?"

"Aside from turning around and running away?" she said, though of course that wouldn't help, not in the long run. She shook her head to herself as they continued to amble towards the car. Each step scrunched through the gravel. "Focus on my breathing, find something to ground myself."

"Good."

Elizabeth focused on the way each breath pushed against and then fell away from her folded arms, how her chest filled and then her body softened, a gentle rise and fall. The gravel crunched and rasped beneath the soles of her sneakers, whilst the thrushes twittered as they hopped and flitted between the branches of the black walnut tree. The DS agents who sat in the front seats of the car climbed out and then stepped away; their footsteps grated too, whilst the clunk and slam of the doors echoed up and diffused through the smoke-crisp air that hung above the car park.

"How are you feeling?" Dr Sherman asked.

"Okay." Elizabeth nodded. She stopped at a distance of two or three long strides away from the backdoor of the car, about as close as she had come before, until the memory of Will had flooded in and wrenched her into the land between present and past. The images pressed at the edges of her vision, and she tried her best not to push them back or to latch onto anchors or other memories as she had done before. She turned to Dr Sherman. "Please will you open the door."

Dr Sherman stepped forward, opened the door, and then stepped back in line with Elizabeth.

The backseat was empty, but it felt as though the past bled through time until both then and now played out in front of her, their images overlaid, her focus shifting back and forth. Her heart thumped against her ribs and a wave of heat rolled through her. She dropped her hands to her sides and shook them out; the brush of cold air was welcome against her clammy palms, and the movement reignited the feeling in her fingertips.

She swallowed, and then cleared her throat as it stuck. "After the car arrived at the hospital, I was standing in the ambulance bay…Will's lying across the backseat, he won't stop shaking…I don't think he's breathing…One of the doctors climbed into the back with him…and then another one joins her while the other two wait outside…I could see him still shaking and there was nothing I could do except stand there and watch…and I feel…I feel…"

When the silence stretched, Dr Sherman prompted her. "How do you feel?"

"Helpless." The word escaped in a rush of breath. "I know right then that he's going to die."

"Does he die?"

Elizabeth shook her head, and then forced the word out. "No."

"And does he stop seizing?"

She nodded. "Eventually."

"How is now different to that day?"

"It's sunny, not raining; the ground is dry; there's gravel, not concrete—" She pressed the toe of her sneaker down and ground it into the gravel as though to make sure. "—we're in the car park, not the ambulance bay; the sky's clear, not overcast; there are no sirens; I can smell smoke in the air, but no gasoline; the car's empty; there are no doctors…"

"How would you feel about sitting inside?"

Elizabeth paused. Her heart still jittered and a thin layer of sweat clung to her skin, but with each difference she noted, the past began to sheer away and drift further into the background. She gave another curt nod. "I can try."

"In your own time."

Elizabeth eased closer to the car, half-step by half-step, and then she climbed up into the back. She shifted across to the opposite side, to the side where she had sat that day, whilst Dr Sherman climbed in after her and sat in what had been Will's seat. She waited for the panic to take over, for it to engulf her like a tidal wave, but after an initial surge, it returned to knee height, like wading through a river, challenging but not impossible, not enough to knock her over or make her feel like she was about to drown. Perhaps talking it through in the therapy sessions had helped, perhaps she really was inching away from the cusp of falling apart again. _Perhaps…_

She ran her palms down her jeans and clutched her knees. With her chin dipped, her hair fell forward and obscured Dr Sherman from the edge of her vision. "When it happened, when Will collapsed, I felt so helpless. I didn't know what was going on or what I was meant to do."

"So, what did you do?"

"I told Matt to get us to the hospital as quickly as possible. Then I tried to keep Will on his side as much as I could, but it was difficult when he was fitting and the car kept lurching."

"And looking back, what more do you think you could have done to help your brother?"

Elizabeth paused. What could she have done? Matt had wanted to stop, to wait for the ambulance, but that would have taken longer. There was no way she could get the seizure to stop on its own; even when the doctors gave him medication, it didn't work for long. She shook her head and her hair tickled her cheek. "Nothing. He needed the antidote; that was the only way to stop it."

"And when you got to the hospital, what more could you have done?"

She had told the doctor everything she had known. Maybe if she'd noticed her own symptoms earlier, if she had told the doctors then, before she collapsed too…but that would have bought them only a few more minutes at the most, or maybe it would have distracted them as they turned their attention to her and away from Will. She shook her head again. "Nothing."

"So, looking back, you did everything in your power to help him?"

"Yes." The word lodged in her throat. "But it might not have been enough."

"But was it enough? Is he alive and well?"

"Yes." Still the word lodged, as did something else. "I still feel guilty though."

"What could you have done to prevent this from happening?"

She shot Dr Sherman a look. "Aside from not being secretary of state?" She let her gaze linger for a moment, and then turned and stared out the window, though she saw nothing of the world beyond. Someone had been watching the house; she'd thought the car was odd at the time, but not enough to mention it to DS. Should she have said something then? But maybe it was only in hindsight that it felt significant. Henry's suggestion that she was obsessing felt more plausible at the time. And as for the waiter in the restaurant, there was no reason to suspect him. Nor was there any indication that the food had been poisoned. Nor had there been any threats against her, or at least none that she was aware of. What could she have done? How could she have stopped it?

Her chin dipped, and she plucked a stray white thread from her jeans. "I don't know." She turned back to face Dr Sherman, and the corner of her lips tugged at one side. "If I had any reason to think something was going to happen, I would have done everything in my power to stop it… And maybe knowing that there was nothing I could have done should make me feel less guilty—maybe it will over time—but more than anything, it makes me feel even more helpless." Her gaze dipped away, and the ends of her hair trembled as she shook her head. "I don't like it that things happen in life over which I have no control. I don't like feeling like I'm just some pawn of God, or fate, or the universe, or whatever you happen to believe in. I like knowing that you do this and that happens, or you do that and this happens. No interference from external forces."

Dr Sherman raised her eyebrows, two thin arches. "Like a formula?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's an idea I think we ought to explore."

Elizabeth let out an inward groan. Therapy felt like battling the Hydra; each time they worked through one topic they '_needed to explore_', it only ended up spawning two more.

Dr Sherman gave Elizabeth a soft smile, as though she could sense that thought. "But I think it's important to remember that even when an event happens to us, we still retain an element of control. Not over the event itself, but over how we react to it and how we let it define us. You couldn't prevent your brother from falling ill in this car—that happened to you—but in deciding to sit here today, you've taken back control. And in working with me in therapy, you've taken back control. You're able to decide what this event means to you and how it will affect your life going forward. To me, that's real control."

Elizabeth considered that for a moment. "Maybe…" she said. "But it doesn't feel like control."

A pause hung over the car. Dr Sherman studied Elizabeth in the silence, whilst Elizabeth returned to staring out the window. "It interests me that the jobs you've had, from being in the CIA, to teaching, to being secretary of state all involve an element of power and trust."

"And what? You think that stems from my inner need for control?"

"What do you think?"

The tufts of grass beneath the black walnut tree ruffled in the breeze; the image blended with that of a field churning beneath darkened skies as she pounded through it bare-footed in the landscape of the dream. She blinked away the thought, turned her chin to shoulder, and looked to Dr Sherman. "I don't know… But I guess it's something you'd like for us to explore."

Dr Sherman smiled. "If you're ready, I'd like for you to talk me through your experience of the day of the poisoning in more detail, just as we've done in our sessions before, starting with when you and your brother left the restaurant and got into this car."

Elizabeth took a deep breath, sighed it out, and then began the story again. "It had just gone two o'clock when we left the restaurant. It had been warm inside, but it felt chilly when we stepped out onto the sidewalk. I'd left my coat at the office, so Will offered me his jacket…"

* * *

**3:31 PM**

"You didn't have to stay." Elizabeth folded her arms across her chest and trapped the fronts of her cardigan around her as she scrunched across the gravel towards where Russell leant against the open trunk of his car, a polystyrene cup clutched in one hand.

He lifted a second cup from where it balanced in the trunk, and held it out to her. Licks of steam rose up from the coffee and spiralled into the crisp air. "If I didn't stay, then I wouldn't have known that you _were_ fine, and then I wouldn't have been able to tell you: I told you so."

She leant against the edge next to him, and she savoured a sip of coffee. "Well, I guess you can have that. Just this once."

"Plus—" He twisted around and grabbed something from the trunk behind. "—now I can give you these as your reward for not freaking out." He shoved a white paper bag at her.

"What is it?" Her gaze flicked from the bag and back to him.

"Open it and see for yourself."

She paused. Would Russell Jackson's idea of a reward be pleasant or not, especially given his somewhat novel take on therapy? But when he flapped at her in a signal to hurry up, she unfolded the top, the paper rustling beneath her touch, and a smile sprang to her lips. "You didn't."

A dozen or so golden walnut shells of cake stared back at her.

"Well, your staff have been pestering me to send you some for weeks. Eventually found a bakery in DC that makes them."

She plucked one of the hodu-gwaja from the bag and sank her teeth into it. Her eyes slipped shut as the taste of walnut cake and sweet red bean paste flooded her taste buds and filled her whole body with warmth. "So good."

Russell shot her look, possibly of mild distaste. "What's your obsession with them anyway?"

She held the bag out to him, and spoke through her mouthful. "Just try one."

"Red meat, cream sauce, and now cakes." He dipped his hand into the bag. "If Carol finds out about this, it's not the assassin you need to worry about."

"Just like I'm sure Henry will be thrilled to find out you've been visiting me."

"You signed the consent form, didn't you?"

"I did."

"Well then, it's not his call." Russell stopped eyeing the cake with suspicion, and took a tentative bite. The look of distaste melted away into one of pleasant surprise. "They do taste good."

"Told you so." She met his glare with an impish smile. "And they're even better when they're still warm." Her lips curled around the edge of the polystyrene cup as she took a sip of coffee. The taste seemed richer somehow, more alive. Maybe it was just the lingering sweetness from the filling of the hodu-gwaja, but part of her hoped that maybe it was another sign that she had made the right decision to stay at the clinic, that step by step this path would lead her to where she wanted to be, back to herself, back to home. She looked to Russell. "Thank you, Russell."

He gave a slight shake of the head as he stared out across the car park. His voice dragged. "As I said, it was your staff who wanted to send them."

"I didn't mean the hodu-gwaja."

"Don't mention it." He shot her a sideways glance. "To anyone. Ever."

"You know, you can just say 'You're welcome'."

"I thought the goal here was to return things to normal."

She nudged his elbow. "Thank you, Russell."

A silence stretched between them. Elizabeth studied him, waiting for his response, but he continued to stare out across the car park and towards the split-rail fence that curved around the opposite side, his gaze blinkered. When he raised his cup to his lips, she turned away and stared out across the car park too. She sipped from her own coffee, and relished its rich warmth. Perhaps such an acknowledgement was too much to ask for, and it wasn't as though it was necessary anyway—unfortunately, they'd both been through enough to know just how much his support meant to her—and he wasn't wrong when he said that the goal was to return things to normal. Yes, him being there was enough. She could be grateful for that, acknowledged or not.

But then it came.

No more than a mutter.

"You're welcome."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Let me know what you think. : )**


	57. Chapter Fifty-Five: needle in a hayst

**Chapter Fifty-Five**

**…****needle in a haystack.**

**Conrad**

**Monday, 3rd December, 2018**

**12:31 PM**

"Right, let's get started, shall we?" Conrad lowered himself into one of the brown leather armchairs at the head of the coffee table in the Oval Office, whilst Russell, DNI Ephraim Ware and Director Doherty took their seats on the two cobalt couches.

"Andrei Kostov." Russell plucked a photograph of a man in his late twenties from the manila file balanced in his lap, and he laid it down on the coffee table. "Twenty-eight years old. Travelled here on a student visa back in August, using a Bulgarian passport. He was brought to our attention when Secretary McCord recalled having seen a car parked outside her house in the week leading up to October 24th. The secretary was able to identify the car from photographs taken outside her house in the weeks following the incident, and she was able to positively ID Kostov as the waiter who served her in the restaurant where she and her brother were poisoned."

Doherty stooped forward in his seat on the couch opposite. With his elbows to his thighs and his hands clutched in front of him, he watched Russell as Russell spoke. Then, when Russell had finished, he twisted to face Conrad. "Kostov's prints were amongst those that forensics found in the car, and a vial containing traces of diasiozin was found lodged beneath the driver's seat."

"We know that someone had access to Dr Adams's cell phone," Russell said, "so they knew that he and the secretary would be meeting at the restaurant, and as their waiter, it would've been easy enough for Kostov to slip the diasiozin into her meal."

Doherty nodded along, and then turned back to Conrad. "Given that diasiozin is widely available, it wouldn't have been hard for him to access a supply either."

"And do we know where Kostov is now?" Conrad looked between the two men.

Doherty paused, and at Russell's nod, he continued. "We've spoken with the university. They say that Kostov turned up to enrolment, but he hasn't shown up to any classes since, and the accommodation where he was meant to be staying shows no sign of anyone having lived there. We've notified law enforcement across the country, but so far, nothing."

Russell laid out another couple of photographs. Both showed lines of cars parked along the side of a road, drenched in the darkened orange haze of street lamps. "Pictures taken outside Secretary McCord's house place Kostov there in the early hours of Sunday November 11th, when the secretary was seen leaving her property and not returning." He tapped a grey hatchback in each image. "That's our last sighting of him."

Doherty continued. "Having interviewed the other men whose fingerprints were found in the car and the man who was stopped driving it last week, we believe that Kostov abandoned the car shortly after confirming that the secretary's still alive."

Russell turned to Conrad. "We think that's what he was doing outside their house following the poisoning. With Elizabeth keeping a low profile and with no reports in the media other than those saying she was taking leave while her brother was sick, there was no way for Kostov to know if the attempt had been successful or not."

Conrad's jaw tightened. "And now that he knows she's alive?"

Doherty parted his clasped hands and then brought them back together in front of him, a vague gesture that seemed to allude to the vague grasp they had on the situation. "It's possible that he fled, now that he knows there's a witness who could potentially ID him."

Russell dismissed that suggestion with a shake of the head. "But Immigration say there's no evidence of him leaving the country." He leant back in his seat, and drummed his fingers against the arm of the couch. He gave a half-hearted shrug. "I suppose it's possible he might be using a different ID, or he could've just slipped past them. God knows they're more preoccupied with people trying to sneak in than those trying to get out."

"We're using facial recognition," Doherty said, "but there's three weeks' worth of footage to go through and hundreds of ports, so it's a time-consuming process, and even if he is there, there's no guarantee that we'll pick him up. The technology's not exactly accurate."

"We think it's more likely that he's lying low and waiting for the opportunity to make another attempt." Russell's gaze dipped to where his hand rested against the arm of the couch. He curled his fingers into a loose fist. "His motivation certainly won't have changed, and if he's concerned about being caught, he'll have even more reason to want to silence her."

Conrad's frown deepened until his expression felt dark enough to rival the grey gloom that seeped in through the net curtains that hung across the doors to the walkway and the windows at the opposite end of the Oval Office. "In which case, I think I'd rather he had fled."

Doherty looked from Conrad to Russell and then back again. "We're reaching out to Canadian and Mexican border officials to see if they've noticed anything suspicious, and we're making them aware of our interest in Kostov, but as Russell said, our assumption is that he's currently still within US borders and that he still poses a very real threat."

"And of course—" Russell's voice dragged. "—there's always the possibility of accomplices assisting him within the US. We know that he traveled here alone, but that doesn't rule out the fact that others could have come ahead of him or joined him after he arrived. Immigration are getting into it as we speak, but unfortunately they don't have a lot to go on. If there are any accomplices, they could be travelling on any type of visa, from any country, and could have come through any port of entry."

Conrad arched his eyebrows. "So, just your typical needle in a haystack."

Russell huffed, and swept his hand up into the air. "More like a needle in a field full of haystacks during a total solar eclipse, with a blindfold thrown in for good measure."

The lull that followed echoed with the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk… _of the grandfather clock in the background.

With his elbow still propped against the wooden armrest, Conrad rubbed the line of his jaw and tried to ease away the tension. He had hoped that finally finding a lead in the investigation would offer a modicum of comfort, but until all those responsible for this—both known and unknown—were caught, there was no telling if Bess would be safe. And that thought was far from comforting.

He allowed his gaze to drift from Russell to Ephraim, who sat at the far end of the couch, stooped forward with his elbows rested against his lap. "What's the IC's take on it, Ephraim?"

Ephraim drew in a long breath before he began. "Well, we believe that 'Kostov' is just an alias, and a pretty sophisticated one at that."

"You'd hope it'd have to be in order to gain access to a student visa," Conrad said, "unless we're just handing them out like stickers at a polling station."

Ephraim gave a perfunctory smile. "Secretary McCord was able to describe a tattoo she saw on Kostov's wrist. It was fairly distinctive, so we sent the description out through the IC."

"Tell me we got a hit."

"We did." Ephraim freed a slim stone blue file from where he had wedged it between the cushion of the couch and the armrest. "Our agents in Russia reported that identical tattoos are being used by a group whose name roughly translates as 'Protectors of Mother Russia'."

He laid out a set of three photographs on the coffee table, and paused to square each one so that they aligned with the edge of the wood. All the photographs were covert shots taken at long range. They all showed groups of white men, aged anywhere from their early twenties to late forties, all with shaved heads, and all with the bands of the tattoo prominent around their wrists.

"I'm guessing they're not eco-warriors," Russell said as he peered down at the photographs.

Ephraim's eyebrows raised. "That they are not." He looked to Conrad. "They're a group of isolationists centred around Moscow, and they're not exactly fans of Secretary McCord. It seems as though they subscribe to Maria Ostrova's painting of her as a 'rusalka'."

Conrad tutted and shook his head to himself. "I know one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but that woman was nothing but trouble."

"The group feel that the relationship between the US and Russia has become too close recently—"

Russell balked and threw both hands up. "What news channel are they watching? We can't even get them to agree on policing a strip of ocean, for crying out loud."

Ephraim continued as though Russell hadn't spoken. "—and they believe that Secretary McCord is the orchestrator of that, largely through her influence on Russian officials."

"So, what? They thought they'd kill her to stop her from meddling in Russian affairs?"

Ephraim gave a half-shrug as his gaze flitted to Russell. "And to stop any possibility of her running for the presidency in the future. According to them, her plans for foreign policy are an affront to their sovereignty."

Conrad's gaze dipped to the photographs, though he took in more of the shimmer of light that reflected off their surface from the chandelier overhead than the images themselves. "And aside from the tattoo, do we have anything more concrete to tie them to Kostov?"

"Not yet," Ephraim said, "but our agents in country are working to gather more intel and to prove a direct link between them and Kostov. SIGINT are into it too." He paused, and he tapped the edge of the file he still held in his hand. "But there is one thing we know."

Conrad's eyes narrowed, and at the slight reluctance hidden beneath the mask of Ephraim's expression, the pit of his stomach tighten just enough to make him think that perhaps he wouldn't want to know what came next. But he pressed anyway— "Go on."

Ephraim laid out a second row of three photographs beyond the first. They were clandestine shots as well, all featuring similar-looking men to those shown before, but also men in forest green suits. He looked up at Conrad, his eyebrows raised, his eyes wide with whites gleaming beneath the wiry frames of his glasses. His lips flinched at one corner. "Members of the group have been seen meeting with known officers of the GRU."

The weight of the words pressed down upon the room. They forced a silence that pulsed and hummed.

Conrad pinched his brow whilst the tension that radiated along his jaw deepened. He had been right: he didn't want to know.

"Well—" Russell's eyebrows arched in a mix of unsurprised surprise and a touch of resignation. "—that would certainly explain where they got the alias and documentation from, and I suppose it explains the bats in the tattoo."

Conrad stared past him, towards Ephraim. Though the assumption seemed clear, after the self-doubt ingrained in him by the meningioma, it felt as though he needed to voice it out loud. "So, the order for the attempt could have come straight from the Kremlin."

"Yes," Ephraim said, and then his gaze dipped away, towards the coffee table, as he gestured to the photographs. "Though, while we can prove that these meetings took place between the group and the GRU, we don't know what they were discussing. And even if it did relate to the assassination attempt, it would be hard to prove who actually gave the order."

Russell held his hands wide as he pivoted in his seat and looked between Ephraim, Doherty and Conrad. "I know Salnikov's hardly what you'd call stable, but we don't seriously think he'd be crazy enough to order the assassination of the US secretary of state, do we?"

"Well, you'd certainly hope not." Conrad let out a long sigh; it did nothing to ease the pressure growing in his chest. "But if he is, then using a group of right-wing isolationist to carry it out and distance the Kremlin from any culpability would certainly be one way to go about it."

Ephraim nodded along. The corners of his lips tweaked into a glum smile. "We've circulated Kostov's details, along with a description of the tattoo, through INTERPOL, saying he's wanted in connection with two counts of attempted murder, but so far the Russians have ignored our request for any information that might lead to his capture."

"Yet they must be aware of both the group and the tattoo." Conrad swept his hand towards the photographs that showed the meetings between the GRU officers and the members of the group. "You can't tell me that our agents know more than the Kremlin does."

"So," Russell said, "either they didn't get the memo—"

"Or they've got something to hide." Conrad tugged at his lower lip, whilst the furrows of his brow deepened. Though how the Kremlin thought they could cover this up, he didn't know.

"Minister Avdonin is in DC." Russell shoulders rose in a shrug that never fell. "We could reach out to him, make sure he's aware and give them the chance to respond."

"No." Conrad's gaze darted up to meet Russell's. "I'm taking this straight to Salnikov." He braced himself against the arms of the chair and pushed himself up from the seat. The other men scrambled to their feet too. "Whatever game they're playing, we're getting to the bottom of it."

"Sir…" Russell ran his hand over his head and then let it fall to his hip before he met Conrad's eye again. "If we accuse them of being involved—"

"We're not going to accuse them." Conrad drew his chin back. It was as though Russell thought the neurosurgeons had removed his tact along with the tumour cells. "We're merely going to ask for their assistance in detaining a wanted criminal and his associates, and if the Kremlin have played no part in this—" He gestured to the photographs that tiled the coffee table. "—then there's no reason for them to ignore that request."

"Apart from the fact that they're Russian," Russell muttered.

"Set up the call, Russell."

But Russell gave a slight shake of the head. "Sir… I think it might be more prudent for us to wait until we've gathered further information—" He motioned towards Ephraim, who stood a pace or so behind him. "—see what HUMINT and SIGINT uncover."

Conrad's tone sharpened. "By which time Kostov and God knows how many accomplices could've made a second attempt, and this time they might well be successful."

With his hands rested on his hips, Russell gave a stilted shrug. "Maybe that's the problem."

"Talk straight with me, Russell."

Russell turned to Doherty and Ephraim, and then jerked his head towards the door. He waited in silence whilst they gathered together the photographs, the rustle of paper filling the air, and then nodded their goodbyes to Conrad along with taut smiles and a sharp—'_Mister President_'—before they strode from the room.

When the door clunked shut and the cream and pearl stripes of the wallpaper slotted back into place, Russell pivoted to face Conrad. "I know you want to keep Elizabeth safe, we all do, and God knows I want to catch the sons of bitches who're responsible, but—"

"You think I'm taking this personally?"

Russell nodded.

Conrad eyed him for a long moment whilst the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk… _of the grandfather clock clunked out the seconds of silence. "Well, it is personal."

With his hands tucked in his trouser pockets, he ambled around the back of the sofa and towards his desk. "Any attack on a US citizen, particularly a targeted attack driven by political ideologism, is an attack on the United States. It's terrorism, and if that's not personal, I don't know what is."

"I just don't see what good will come from calling him."

"If the Kremlin aren't involved, it gives them the opportunity to help us and it could provide us with information that leads to the capture of Kostov, and if they are involved…" He sank down into the office chair and rocked back against the leather cushion. "Well, it puts them on notice. Could make them think twice about a second attempt."

"Or it could provoke them." Russell's voice strained.

Conrad arched his eyebrows at him. "Set up the call, Russell."

* * *

"President Salnikov." Conrad leant forward in his office chair as he addressed the monitor opposite. He rested his elbows against the desk, his hands clasped in front of him.

"President Dalton." Salnikov sat straight-backed in his own chair, and he opened his hands as though in welcome. A smile uncurled across his lips. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"We recently sent out a notice through INTERPOL regarding a man travelling under the name of Andrei Kostov."

Salnikov's smile flinched. "Yes. The Bulgarian."

"So, you are aware?"

"My staff made me aware."

Conrad shot a glance towards Russell, who hovered to the right of the desk with his arms folded loosely across his chest, and then he returned to Salnikov. "Then you'll also be aware that we're seeking information about any individuals known to have a tattoo matching Kostov's."

"My staff mentioned."

"Well, we've received reports saying there's a group in Russia using this tattoo to signify their allegiance to what they call—" Conrad frowned down at the sheet of paper on his desk. "—'Protectors of Mother Russia'—" He looked up at Salnikov again. "—and that Kostov may have been working with them."

Salnikov's smile soured. "I've never heard of them."

"Perhaps you'd like to check with your staff," Russell muttered.

"Be that as it may," Conrad said, "the US would greatly appreciate your help with this issue. Perhaps your law enforcement agencies would be able to—"

"I'm afraid Russia are unable to assist in this matter. This man, Kostov, is Bulgarian. Perhaps you should contact them instead." Salnikov reached towards the screen, ready to terminate the call.

But Conrad raised one hand. "President Salnikov, it's our understanding that Kostov is not Bulgarian but may be travelling under an alias using falsified documents, it's also our understanding that the individuals involved in this group may have met with members of the GRU—"

"Impossible." Salnikov's expression darkened whilst his nostrils flared. "There's no such group in Russia." He jabbed at the keyboard, and the screen cut out.

"Well," Russell said, and he slumped into the seat next to the desk. "That certainly makes a change from their usual non-denial denial."

"So, what do we think?" Conrad leant back in his chair and pivoted to face Russell.

"He clearly knows about the group…though I don't think he expected us to. That doesn't mean he's responsible though."

"Maybe not, but protecting the people who are? That makes him complicit."

"Whatever he is, it doesn't help us with the investigation. We can keep looking for Kostov in the US, but without being able to question the others involved…" Russell trailed off and finished the thought with a shrug instead.

"Needle in a haystack," Conrad murmured. Then his gaze sharpened on Russell, and as his brow pinched with a frown, his tone sharpened too. "If Salnikov's not involved, then why deny all knowledge of this group?" He gestured to the screen. "Why get so defensive?"

"As I said, they're Russian." Russell tossed one hand up. "They'd deny the existence of their own mothers just to be contrary, God forbid they say anything in agreement with the US." He stooped forward in his seat, and looked up at Conrad over the rims of his glasses. "Look, we all know that Salnikov loves nothing more than to slag off Elizabeth on that talkshow of his, but ordering her assassination…?"

Conrad drummed his fingers against the leather armrest. "Could explain why they were digging their heels in over signing off on this deal in the BSR prior to the poisoning, if they knew that she wasn't going to be around much longer."

Salnikov certainly had the means and the motive, and using such a group would provide him with adequate cover were the story ever exposed. Plus, it wouldn't be the first time that he'd ordered an assassination on US soil.

Conrad's fingers stilled, and he looked to Russell. "Loop in the NSC. Tell them I want options. The attempted murder of the secretary of state will not go unanswered."

Russell's brow crumpled into a frown, and he opened his mouth as though to protest.

But Conrad silenced him with one raised hand. "Keep the IC on it, get them to gather as much intel as they can." His gaze turned distant, and a clench gripped his jaw. "Once we prove that the GRU have been supporting the group and Kostov, sanctions will be the least of Russia's problems."

Russell looked as though he still held a counterargument balanced on the tip of his tongue, but if he did, it was quelled by a sharp rap at the door.

After a second, no more, Lucy ducked inside. "Sorry to interrupt, Mister President."

"What is it, Luce?" Conrad frowned at the way she wrung her hands in front of her.

"I just thought that Mr Jackson might want to know…"

Russell twisted around.

"…Stevie…"

When the pause stretched, Russell held his hands out wide. "Well? What about her?"

A slight flush warmed Lucy's cheeks. "She's shouting at the vice president."

Conrad's expression fell in time with Russell's, and he couldn't be sure which one of them spoke first. "She's what?"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Sorry this chapter was short and sucky. Longer and (hopefully) less sucky chapter tomorrow. : )**


	58. Chapter Fifty-Six: the elephant in the

**Chapter Fifty-Six**

**…****the elephant in the room.**

**Stevie**

**1:13 PM**

Stevie cast a quick glance around the office—just to check. With Adele still on her lunch break, the larger of the two desks was left unoccupied, and the silence that drifted through from the main office confirmed that Russell hadn't yet returned. Stevie leant down, one eye on the corridor outside as staffers strode past in a flash of paperwork and suits, and she fumbled through her handbag until her fingertips found the cold brush of the metal that cased her cell phone.

She stooped forward in her seat and clicked the screen on. The backlight flared.

No messages. No missed calls.

The barest twinge of disappointment, like a guitar string scuffed by the edge of a thumb, thrummed through her. Jon would be busy—no doubt on another ward round—but talking with him was fun, flirting with him was fun, not having people constantly asking her '_How's your mother doing?_' was fun; being around him made her feel important and interesting for a change, not like someone valued only as her mother's daughter, and it gave her a welcome break from the stifling silence of home.

And, for a while, it hushed the feeling that, in truth, nothing about the situation was fun at all.

"Hello, Stevie."

Stevie jolted upright and spun towards the door.

Teresa Hurst stood in the doorway, one palm rested against the wooden frame, whilst the fingers of the opposite hand touched the string of pearls that hung around her throat; a gesture that directed the eye to the pearls' subtle opulence but hid in the guise of a nervous habit.

Stevie forced a smile so wide that it felt as though her lips might crack. "Madam Vice President—" She slid her cell phone beneath a piece of paper that draped over the edge of the binder on the desk. "How can I help you?"

"Is Russell in?"

Stevie's gaze drifted towards the door to Russell's office, and then back to Hurst. "I think he's in a meeting with the president right now."

"Well, will he be available soon?"

"I'm not sure." Stevie bit her lower lip. "Is it urgent?"

"No." Hurst offered her a smile; perhaps it was meant to be sweet, but instead it held the acidic sting of a Sour Patch Kid. "It was just about campaign donors, that's all."

"Right." _Of course it was_. Stevie snatched a file towards her from the front edge of her desk, and then let her gaze flick up to Hurst. The corners of her lips tugged into a flatline of a smile. "Well, I'll let him know that you stopped by." With a curt nod, she added, "Madam Vice President."

She prised back the cover of the folder, and dragged one fingertip along the jumbled stream of letters that must have formed words, whilst in the upper edge of her vision, the blue-suited shadow of Teresa Hurst continued to lurk. Beneath the desk, Stevie's foot jittered against the floor whilst she willed Hurst to turn and walk away. She didn't know what was worse: Morejon digging for dirt and calling her mom an alcoholic, or Hurst picking over the bones of her mother's career as she scavenged for campaign donors.

"How's your mother doing?" Hurst asked.

Stevie turned the page with a crisp swish. "Fine."

"We haven't seen her around here in a while."

Stevie rolled her eyes. "Well, she is on leave, so…"

A slight pause. "And when do you think she'll be back?"

"Not a clue."

A longer pause. "I was sorry to hear that she might not be holding a holiday party this year."

"I bet you were," Stevie muttered.

"Excuse me?"

Stevie bit her tongue, and she met Hurst with an empty smile. "Nothing."

Hurst eyed her as though she genuinely hadn't heard her and was perhaps assessing whether or not to press the matter. Then her lips stretched thin, whilst her fingertips ran over the string of pearls once more. "Well…pass on my best to her and your uncle, won't you?"

"Sure." Stevie gave another flash of that grim smile.

Though, of course, how could she possibly pass on Hurst's—or anyone else's—best wishes when she hadn't seen or spoken to her mother in over three weeks and she didn't have a clue what was going on seeing as how Russell was doing his utmost to keep her in the dark, even though the chance of her letting something slip to her father was next to none, given that they'd barely spoken since he'd admitted that the only type of run that her mother was intent upon was the type that would see her leaving the clinic and hurtling ever deeper into the stranger she'd become.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the stranger she had been all along. _Raised in a house of secrets and lies_. She shook her head to herself and let out a low snort. Harrison wasn't wrong.

"And who knows," Hurst said, and the same stinging sweetness seeped into her tone, "last year you managed to pull the party together overnight…even if it did involve a taco truck… Perhaps this year, if your mother changes her mind, she'd care to give us a little more warning first."

It might have been the poaching of campaign donors, or possibly the snide mention of the taco truck, or maybe just Hurst having the misfortune to be one in a long line of people trying to squeeze information out of her about her mother, but it didn't matter, not really, what mattered was that something inside Stevie snapped.

"Oh. My. God." She clutched the air next to her head. "Why does everyone in this town have to be so two-faced?"

"I beg your pardon." Hurst drew her chin back, shocked.

"I bet you're loving this—" Stevie swept one hand across the room. "—just wallowing in the fact that someone tried to kill my mom and now she's no longer a threat to you."

Hurst shook her head. "I'm sorry—"

"Don't act all innocent. You've been trying to take her down ever since that whole 'save the freaking orphan' stunt back in Russia."

Hurst's mouth hung open.

"Well, guess what?" Stevie scowled at Hurst. "My mom's an orphan too."

The words beat the air as though each were a black-winged moth that had launched from the tip of her tongue, and they ushered in a silence that strained and strobed. It was enough to transport Stevie back to homeroom, senior year, when Kitty Spitzer had flung open the door and waltzed inside, only to stop dead at the sight of Ms Peterson stood at the front in a daffodil-yellow pantsuit, and exclaim—loud enough that it must have been heard at least three doors down—'What the _fuck_ is she wearing?'. As Stevie heard her own words back now, her expression dropped and her eyes widened in horror, just as Kitty Spitzer's had done, whilst the look of shock on Hurst's face was enough to rival Ms Peterson's. The silence back then sounded the same as it did now; the kind of silence that made it feel as though any noise, any movement, even the flutter of a single breath would see the whole building implode. Kitty Spitzer had done the only thing possible—she had turned, walked out, closed the door, waited thirty seconds, and then reentered and taken her seat in silence as though nothing had happened at all. No one, not even Ms Peterson, mentioned the incident, and after a few moments of dazed blinks, they continued as normal.

If only that were an option now…

Hurst's expression soured, a lemon puckering in on itself. "I beg your pardon."

Stevie opened her mouth, but the words that had come unbidden before now deserted her, and her tongue floundered over the silence, whilst the only thing that played through her mind was, _Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God._ Why couldn't her thoughts have stopped at that before?

"Madam Vice President." Russell's shout rang along the corridor. "Madam Vice President."

A moment later, Russell himself skidded to a halt outside the office. He rested his hands on his hips, and his shoulders rounded forward whilst his chest heaved over each breath.

Stevie's mouth still hung open. _Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God._

"You—" Russell glowered at her and thrust a finger at her chest. "Out here. Now."

But Stevie's whole body had frozen.

"Russell." Hurst turned her look on him. "I think you and I need to talk."

Russell mustered a smile, but the grim look beneath and the sheen of cold sweat that glistened on his brow said that perhaps he was praying for another heart attack, or perhaps one was already coming on. "You know what they say, never work with animals and interns." He held his arm out and gestured towards the main office. "Shall we?"

Hurst cast Stevie another disapproving look and then led the way through.

Still Stevie's mind reeled. _Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God._

Russell rested his fists against the front edge of the desk, and leant his weight into them. "What did you just do?"

"I…uh…I…"

Russell's eyes bugged. "Well?"

"I…" Heat flared through Stevie's cheeks. "Something about orphans…"

"Did you tell her where your mom is?"

Stevie shook her head.

"Did you tell her about—" Russell lowered his voice to a hiss "—_the_ _attempt_?"

The attempt? _Just wallowing in the fact that someone tried to kill my mom… _Stevie's eyes widened. "Oh crap."

Russell recoiled from the desk, and spinning around, he raised both fists to the back of his head, his elbows thrust wide. He muttered a much harsher curse of his own.

Stevie's voice went high-pitched. "I thought she knew."

Russell's shoulders slumped, and he shook his head to himself. He gestured towards the corridor. "Out."

"What?"

He stalked towards his office, his finger still directing her towards the corridor. "Out. Now."

Stevie stumbled to her feet; her high heels teetered beneath her. "But where am I supposed to go?"

Russell turned to face her whilst he clutched the brass doorknob. "If it were up to me, you'd be in the first Uber home, but as it is, the president wants to see you."

"The president? But… But why?"

"You just shouted at the vice president and gave out classified information. Why'd you think the president wants to see you?" Russell stared at her, the whites of his eyes flared. Then he clutched his brow, his eyes closed, and he made a motion as though reminding himself to breathe. "Just go to the Oval Office, and for God's sake, keep your mouth shut."

* * *

Well, if she was going to be fired, perhaps this was the way to go. Go big _and_ go home. Stevie kept her gaze glued to the eggshell carpet as she tottered along the corridor, one hand clinging to the faux leather straps of the handbag that hung from her shoulder whilst her blush still burned in her cheeks.

Perhaps this was a good thing. After all, she wanted her own life, right? Maybe losing her job was just what she needed. She would go to law school, just as she'd planned; she would move away from home, and this time not come running back; she would gain her independence, the very thing that she craved. Only faced with the thought now, the whole prospect tasted sour. Perhaps that wasn't what she really wanted at all.

The grey gloom that bled through the net curtains veiling the row of windows darkened from pebbledash to slate, and it dimmed the air with its touch. It brushed up against the edge of her mind too. What she wanted was to go back to October 24th. She wanted Russell to un-speak the words that told her that her mother had collapsed. She wanted her mother and Uncle Will to un-eat the poisoned food. She wanted the kink in the path to be straightened, and for life to restart along the route she believed that they were heading down before. Maybe then this distance would never have ached between her and her mother. Not the physical separation; through a lifetime of unannounced 'business' trips or actual diplomatic work, that she had become used to. No. What tugged at her, keeping her trapped in this ever-wavering back and forth, was the growing sense that her mother had chosen to hide things from her, things that were part of her past and her present and would affect her future as well. Not just the presidency, though that stuck most prominent in her mind, as though run or not were synonymous with recover or not, but the smaller things that had accumulated in her thoughts over the past few weeks too. From Russell insinuating that her mother hadn't left the CIA for ethical reasons; to the snatch of a memory from her eighth birthday of waiting by the door only for her mother never to arrive home; to the grandparents she had never known, but for whom her mother silently grieved to the point that it consumed; to the question that dominated it all—How could the mother she knew fall apart like this, when Uncle Will didn't seem to care at all?

Stevie stopped in front of Lucy's desk, and she shifted her weight to the outside of her feet. Her grip on the bag tightened until her knuckles blanched. "President Dalton wanted to see me."

Lucy looked up, offered Stevie a taut smile, and held her hand out towards the door. "Go straight through."

Stevie hesitated for a moment—Did she really want to? But it was probably best just to get it over with, fast if not painless, and so she crept towards the half-open door. She knocked, barely scuffing her knuckles against the wood, and at the sound, President Dalton twisted around in his seat on the near couch.

"Stevie." He pushed himself up to standing. "Come in. Have a seat."

She slipped inside, and leaving the door as it was, she stole half-step by half-step towards the opposite sofa. A plate of biscuits—chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps and snickerdoodles—sat in the middle of the coffee table, a pot of coffee ready to pour at the side. She let her bag slip down from her shoulder and placed it in a crumpled slouch at the foot of the couch before she sank onto the cushion and wiped away the sweat from her palms against her suit skirt.

Dalton gestured towards the coffee pot, and when Stevie gave a quick nod, he poured the coffee out into the two awaiting ceramic cups. Whilst the steam spiralled up, he pointed his gaze towards the biscuits. "Help yourself."

She followed his gaze, but her hands remained stuck to her lap. She'd never been fired before, certainly not by the president, but surely it didn't normally come with coffee and cookies. "Mister Dalton…" Her blush deepened. "I mean, Mister President—"

"It's been Mister Dalton for most of your life, I wouldn't expect that to change now."

"Look, I know you're going to have to fire me, but if you think you have to be nice to me about it because my mom is, well, my mom and your secretary of state and friend or whatever…" Stevie's gaze dipped to where her fingers twisted together in her lap, and she shook her head to herself whilst her cheeks burned. "God, now I'm just rambling." She took a deep breath and then looked up again. "I'd rather just get it over with. Rip the Band-Aid off."

"What did Russell say to you?" Dalton's brow furrowed as he pushed the cup and saucer towards her. The coffee swayed and shot off glimmers of light as the cup moved.

"That you wanted to see me because I shouted at the VP and might possibly have given out classified information about someone trying to kill my mom." Stevie winced. God, it sounded even worse when she said it out loud, and she hadn't even mentioned the part about 'save the freaking orphans'. "I know that firing me is probably the least you should do—"

"I'm not going to fire you."

"Oh…" Stevie's wince fell away, only for it to be replaced a second later by an uncertain frown. "Because you really, probably should."

"I'm aware."

"So…is Russell going to fire me instead?"

"Not today." Dalton stirred a lump of brown sugar into his coffee; the spoon clinked off the inside of the cup with each turn. Then his gaze darted up to meet hers, and he pointed one finger at her. "Though do something like this again, and I'm sure he'd only be too happy to oblige."

"I didn't exactly plan it. It just…happened."

"I know." He offered her a kind smile, and then motioned to the plate of biscuits again.

Stevie leant forward, reached past the chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles, and plucked a ginger snap from the far side. There was something about ginger snaps; a warmth that went deeper than the spices they held, like that intangible essence that makes a house a home.

Dalton smiled to himself and gave a huff of a laugh.

She paused. "What is it?"

"Nothing." He shook his head.

When his smile lingered, she raised her eyebrows a fraction.

"Inside joke." And as she settled back into her seat, he took one of the ginger snaps too.

Using her front teeth, Stevie snapped off one edge of the biscuit, and the flood of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon filled her mouth. At the rush of its scent, something tugged at the back of her mind. With a loose fist held to her lips, she chewed over the bite and then swallowed it down. "I remember my mom said something once, about you giving her a box of ginger snaps…something about one biscuit at a time."

Dalton stopped halfway through leaning back into his seat, the cup and saucer lifted in one hand, the biscuit resting on the side. His eyes were wide enough that the ghost of Thomas Jefferson might as well have been walking along behind her.

He shook the look away again with another huff of a laugh. "I did, and I can't even begin to tell you how surreal it is to be sat here with you now." He settled back against the cushion, and brought the lip of the saucer almost to his chest. "I know you won't thank me for saying this, but at times you look remarkably like her."

"My dad always says that. I never believe him."

"Well, it's true." His eyebrows arched. "On more than one occasion, I've happened to catch you walking along the corridor with the other staffers, and it's enough to carry me back to Langley when she was first starting out." His lips flinched into a smile. "Funny the tricks the memory can play."

Stevie took another bite, more tentative this time, just grazing the edge with her teeth. "I think she said she'd been struggling with something at the time, that's why you gave her the biscuits."

He lowered his gaze to his cup. "She was."

"Struggling like she is now?"

"No. A different kind of struggle."

"Then…what was it about?"

He shook his head, and raised his gaze to meet hers. "That's not my story to tell."

"But did you ever think she'd get like this?"

"Look, Stevie…" He placed the cup and saucer down on the coffee table, and then stooped forward, his elbows to his lap as he fixed her with a wide stare. "Watching someone you love struggling is tough, even more so when you don't know what's going on. At times you blame them, at times you blame yourself, at times you blame God. But beneath it all you're grappling with the question: Why them, why this, why now? Now, you can wrap yourself up in circles going over that, but the truth is that often there isn't an answer, or at least not one that we can understand, and looking for it can blind us to what's really important."

"And what's that?"

"Finding a way forward."

Stevie's gaze dipped to the coffee table. It lingered there for a long moment before she met his eye once more. "But what if you don't want to go forward? What if you just want to go back?"

"Then, as someone who's spent a lot of time pulling apart the past, trust me when I say: you're never going to win."

"So…I should just move on?"

"I said move forward, not move on." He lifted his cup to his lips, then paused and looked at her over the brim. "Though, I suppose, really that's your decision to make."

Stevie studied her own cup, still resting against the coffee table, whilst her fingertips worried the rough bitten edge of the ginger biscuit. Did she want to move on, move up, move out? Independence felt like a five-star luxury resort in The Seychelles: idyllic for the first week or two, but how long until the isolation set in and she'd start to see the cracks? She shook her head to herself and her hair swayed against raised shoulders. "I just don't want to spend my whole life living in my mom's shadow. I mean, maybe I was okay with it before, but since this whole _thing_'s happened, it's started to feel like maybe I don't have a clue who she really is, and why should I give up the things I want in my life when it feels like she's hiding so much of hers."

"I think you'll find we're all guilty of that, especially when it comes to our kids."

"I'm not saying that she should tell me everything, but she should at least tell me the things that matter, the things that affect me. Or at the very least, not lie about stuff."

In the pause, Dalton studied her. With his elbow propped against the arm of the couch, he rubbed the mid-joint of his forefinger against his cheek, whilst his expression remained neutral, as though he were letting the words soak in before he formulated his response.

The silence stretched and stretched and stretched, until even the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the grandfather clock seemed to grow languid and elongate.

The blush returned to Stevie's face in a prickle of heat that crawled up her neck. With her gaze fixed on the near edge of the coffee table, she shook her head again. "Look, I know you were a spy and all, so maybe you have a higher tolerance for secrets, but I'd rather know the real her instead of being fed just another cover story. I mean, a 'conference' in San Francisco I can deal with, but letting me buy into this whole _persona_…" She pursed her lips into a tight bud, and then raised a defiant stare. "The mother I knew would never let herself get like this and she sure as hell wouldn't just give up. And maybe I wouldn't have known or even cared that that wasn't the real her, had it never fallen apart."

Dalton's finger stilled against his cheek. "You think she's been hiding who she really is?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I mean, this had to come out of somewhere. Right?"

"To be fair, what she's been through… It would try the best of us."

"But Uncle Will's fine."

He shook his head. "It's not the same."

"Why not?"

"Because she woke up." His gaze bored into her.

Stevie held his gaze for as long as she could, but then her own gaze started to falter. Her chin dipped and she stared down at the half ginger biscuit that sweated beneath her grip and left sticky crumbs across her skirt. It was true. Uncle Will had spent all that time unconscious, blissfully oblivious, whilst her mother had spent every second tormenting herself over whether he would recover or not.

Stevie bunched her lips to one side and gave a stilted shrug. "Even so, the mother I knew wouldn't have fallen apart. She would've thrown herself into her work, or done something productive, or…I don't know…" The thought wisped into silence. She crunched off another bite of biscuit, more to distract herself than anything else, and then she placed the rest down on the side of the saucer and picked up her cup. "Besides—" She took a sip. "—if it were the other way round, Uncle Will wouldn't have fallen apart."

Dalton continued to watch her, his face rested in the L between finger and thumb, whilst the frown that marked his brow deepened as slow as night descending.

Stevie raised her eyebrows as she took another sip. "You think I'm being too harsh."

"That's not what comes to mind." He paused, and then stooped forward in his seat and folded his hands together in the space between his knees, whilst with the front of his suit jacket open, his blue chequered tie swayed away from his chest. The look in his eyes hardened until it became almost cutting, like the edge of a flint. "Do you recall the parable of the blind men and the elephant?"

Stevie's eyes widened. _What…?_ She clinked her cup down against the saucer. "Um…"

"One man touches the side of the elephant and asserts it must be a wall; another touches the tusk and asserts it must be a spear; another touches the leg and asserts it must be a tree trunk. And so on and so on." Dalton wound one hand through the air, and then stilled. "The point is, each man takes a single piece of evidence and bases his truth upon that and that alone. The moral of the story is that while one person's subjective experience can be true in itself, the assumptions based on that experience are limited in that they fail to take into account other coexistent truths or to consider alternative yet equally plausible explanations. That's why, in government and law enforcement and the like, we rely upon a panel of opinions and a convergence of evidence."

"Okay…"

"I think that, right now, you're feeling your way around the situation as you try to piece together and come to terms with what's happened. What you've found is a gap in your knowledge of your mother, and so you assume that she must've been hiding things from you, and you've found a different side to her, and so you assume that perhaps she's been a different person all along. Now, while that might be one interpretation of the situation, I think it fails to take account of all the available evidence, and it certainly makes no attempt to integrate these findings into the picture you already have of her as a whole."

Stevie opened her mouth ready to protest. That wasn't what was going on at all.

But Dalton raised one hand in a stop sign. "Don't worry, you'll get your opportunity to raise a counterargument. Just hear me out first."

Stevie closed her mouth again, her lips pursed, and she sank into the seat until her back brushed against the cushions behind.

Dalton fixed her with another hard stare, his eyes more white than anything else. "You say that the mother you know would never let herself get like this. Now, glossing over the fact that that's the very nature of the beast—it makes people act in ways so unlike themselves—I don't know if I'd agree with your assessment. I think sometimes the perfect storm can come along and it can shake even the most resilient of us, your mother included. And while I'm far from a specialist on the subject, given even a basic overview of her history, I can see why this situation might be particularly challenging for her."

"You mean her parents?"

He nodded.

"But Uncle Will—"

"I'm not going to argue with you over whether your uncle would have reacted differently or not, because given what I've learnt over the years, I have no doubt that he would. And I'm not going to go into the reasons as to why that might be the case, because it's not my place to pick apart their past, especially not if it's something your mother hasn't already discussed with you."

Stevie chewed on the inside of her cheek and fought back the argument that that was just another example of what her mother had been hiding from her, whilst Dalton's stare warned her against broaching that point.

When she held to her silence, he continued, one finger lifted in acknowledgement. "I do agree with one thing you said though: when she finds herself in a tough spot, she doesn't quit. That's why, when the perfectly rational and certainly more politically expedient thing to do would've been to replace her weeks ago, we've stood by her and told her she can take the time that she needs. She might have had a false start, but I think we're all entitled to a few of those—along with the odd outburst here and there, as unprofessional as it may be." He gave her a flash of a taut smile, enough to make another flush of heat rise into her cheeks. "But the fact of the matter remains: she's not given up."

Whether that was true or not though, Stevie didn't know. Whilst her mother certainly hadn't come home, that didn't mean that she was actively working towards getting better, it didn't mean that she wouldn't try to leave again.

"She's not come home." Stevie's shoulders flinched forward. "There's a difference."

Dalton paused. He eyed her in a way that suggested he recalled that once upon a time, people used to answer him back and how much he had disliked it back then and even more so now. "There is." A sharpness coursed beneath his tone. "But you'll note I didn't say that she's not come home, I told you that she's not given up."

Another silence passed. It felt as though Dalton were challenging her to argue with that.

"Now—" He sipped from his coffee and then clunked the cup back down, a slight grimace as he swallowed. "—as to your assertion that she's been hiding things from you and lying to you, without going into specific examples, I can't ascertain the truth of that, but knowing her I can assume that either the information was classified and she couldn't share it with you, or that she believed it wasn't in your best interest to share it at that point in time…or perhaps she just didn't realise that you felt it was so important to you." He held her gaze for a moment, the look spear-sharp. "I might also remind you that your mother doesn't owe you any of her thoughts or feelings or memories, regardless of whether they relate to you or not."

He lowered his gaze to his coffee cup and shook his head to himself as he stirred in a second lump of brown sugar. "People think the CIA's all about aliases and legends and secrets, but in truth, most of it's about relationships. You build up relationships with your assets and targets, and in return, they trust you enough to believe you'll make good on your promises and they provide you with the information you want. Sometimes I think parenting is the same; if you go in demanding or just expecting information, you're never going to get anywhere, but if you invest the time and build on that relationship, then the conversation flows freely and it's surprising how much information will be offered up." He shook the drips of coffee from the spoon and placed it down with a clink against the saucer. "But the thing with all relationships is that they work both ways."

He lifted his gaze to Stevie once more, and it felt as though his look froze her in place. "I've known your mother for the best part of thirty years, as a recruit, a student, a colleague, a confidante and always as a friend, and while she's many things, the words reticent, secretive and withholding are not the ones that spring to mind. I've always found her to be straightforward when it comes to answering questions—obfuscation at State aside—and if she has an answer and she's willing to share it, she will, and if she doesn't or isn't, she'll let you know. As she always says: No harm in asking.

"So, before you accuse your mother of hiding things from you, and before you assume that your lack of understanding of this situation is because she's withheld part of herself, I'd take a while to consider how much time and effort you've invested in your relationship with her, and have you even bothered to ask her the questions that are preoccupying you so much right now?"

Stevie's mouth opened, and her tongue floundered for a response.

But Dalton raised his hand. "I'm not looking for an answer to that. As I said, just consider it. And you might also want to consider that sometimes when we're so focused on not living in another person's shadow, we forget that we always have the option to live in their light instead. Your mother would move heaven and earth to make things happen for you, Stevie, and if it's independence you want, you don't have to push her away, all you've got to do is ask for it."

Stevie felt as though her mind were scrambling over the pieces, frantically trying to arrange the parts of wall, spear and tree trunk that, when taken as a whole, would transform into the elephant. Or the elephant in the room, perhaps. How many times in the weeks leading up to the poisoning had her mother wanted to spend time with her, only for her to say, '_No, maybe another day_'? Was Dalton right: Had she felt so entitled to answers that she'd never even bothered to ask? Was it possible that this side of her mother had always been there, just waiting for the perfect storm? If so, what was she meant to do with that? People might be walking contradictions, but did that mean you couldn't make all the pieces of 'them' fit together, that the pieces had to be separated into two pictures, one real and one not; or were those contradictions what made people, her mother included, more than the sum of their parts?

Her mother was a mom; a wife; a friend; a sister; a colleague; a confidante; the last to rise on weekends; the first to rise on Christmas; one half of the parental unit; one fifth of Team McCord; a stickler for household rules; unconfined by anyone's box; a shark at Cheat; an easy read when telling fibs; a health hazard in the kitchen; a Julia Child of scrambled eggs; a fighter for what she believed was right; a pacifist when it came to home conflict; a diplomat on the world stage; tactless when assessing her daughters' outfits; the life of a party; a reluctant hostess; a cultural integrator; a blurred-edge compartmentalist; a mother without a mother; a daughter without a dad; a survivor of attempts to make the world a better place; a survivor of missions that no one would ever know about. Her mother was an open book: some pages unwritten, some pages unread, some pages beyond comprehension, some pages better left neglected, some pages tear-stained, some pages redacted, but perhaps she'd been fooling herself to ever say that some pages were fabricated.

"While you're thinking on it, I'd like you to have this."

Stevie blinked. How long she'd been staring into space, she didn't know, but President Dalton stood in front of her on the opposite side of the coffee table, a glossy photograph pinched between forefinger and thumb and held out towards her. It bowed into the gap between them.

"It might not be the answer you're looking for," he said, "but it's a piece of your past."

Stevie looked up at him, and any harshness to his expression had gone; it had melted away into that familiar kindness—the Mr Dalton she had once made Christmas cards for, before her mother had left the CIA and before he'd become president. She looked down to the photograph and took it. The paper trembled beneath her touch. She gripped each side, her thumbs tacking to the front edges, and she stared at the image. Herself resting back against the cushions of a couch, a baby lying lengthways in her lap with its fists flailing at its sides— No, wait. _Her mother_ resting back against the cushions of a couch, her face lit with a smile brighter than a camera's flash, whilst she—the baby—lay lengthways in her mother's lap, her fists flailing at her sides.

Stevie's gaze darted back to Dalton. "She looks just like me."

He chuckled. "Well, that's certainly one way to interpret it."

Stevie bunched her lips to one side and resisted her own smile. "Thank you. For this—" She lifted the photograph. "—and for talking to me…and for not firing me."

"Well, if I fired you, I'd have to answer to your mother, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you why I'd rather avoid that." He settled into his own seat again, and picked up the ginger biscuit from the edge of his saucer. He looked at it for a moment, and his smile turned fainter, as though touched by sepia. Then he looked to Stevie, the biscuit held up in his hand. "While it's not my place to tell you what she was struggling with before and why I gave her a box of these biscuits, sitting here with you now, I can tell you this: she made it where she needed to be in the end, and not only that, she thrived at it. And I'm confident that she'll make it through this too."

"One biscuit at a time?"

He nodded, his gaze locked on hers. "One biscuit at a time."

Stevie gave a soft smile, and then her gaze dipped back to the photograph. Her mother looked happy there. Maybe that's what she wanted, more than going back or trying to undo what couldn't be undone, maybe it would be enough just for her mother to be happy again. She leant down and slipped the photograph into her handbag, careful not to crumple it.

The lull that drifted through the room lasted all of three seconds before the door flung wide.

"Well, I think it's safe to say we've prodded the bear." Russell strode in, his cell phone glued to his hand. He looked to Dalton as Dalton twisted around. "ODNI say reports are coming in from agents in country, and it's not looking good."

Stevie took her cue, snatched up the remaining half of her ginger snap from the saucer and then eased to her feet. She pulled the straps of her handbag up onto her shoulder, and then clutching them there, she stole towards the door, intent on slinking away unnoticed. But—

"Stevie—" Russell motioned for her to wait a moment. He gestured behind him, and one of the Secret Service agents stepped inside. "This is Nathaniel. He'll be accompanying you home and keeping an eye on you for the next few days. Just as a precaution." He gave Stevie a pointed stare. "And in case you were still in need of clarification, suitable topics of conversation include the weather, DC traffic, and how it should be illegal to put Christmas decorations up before December. Anything else—"

"Keep my mouth shut. Got it."

"I'm glad we've cleared that up." Russell glanced down at his phone as it bleeped.

Stevie stepped towards the doorway, where Nathaniel waited and took in his surroundings with an impassive stare, but Russell caught hold of her elbow, stilling her, and he leant in towards her, his voice a mutter. "Look, I've got a feeling that things are going to get busy around here, and I don't need to be worrying what trouble you're getting yourself into, so just go home and stay home, okay? No getting into fights and storming out and disappearing off into DC. Do you understand?"

The grip on her arm and the look in his eyes left no room for misunderstanding, and so she nodded, though her pulse thrummed with the question—_Why?_ But perhaps that was a question that she didn't need the answer to, or at least one that she'd rather not think about.

"Good." He let go. "I'll see you tomorrow."

She pivoted after him as he strode towards the couch. "What about the VP?"

"I've taken care of it." He stuffed his cell phone back into his trouser pocket and turned to face her. He gave a shrug. "As much as I hate eating humble pie, hearing Teresa Hurst use the phrase 'save the freaking orphans' might just have made it worth it."

* * *

**2:23 PM**

A grunt and a scuffing sound, like something dragging across the floorboards, greeted Stevie as she stepped inside the entrance hall. Her brow furrowed and she glanced back towards the DS agent on the door, as though he might offer up an explanation, but he said nothing, merely gave her a nod and a terse smile and guided the door back into its frame, and so she toed off her high heels and left them in a toppled heap along with her handbag at the foot of the console table, and then padded through to the living room, step by tentative step.

Across the other side of the room, in the corner between the fireplace and the doorway to the dining room, her father was crouched down and shuffling a Christmas tree into place.

"Um… Hey…" She loitered at the bottom of the stairs. "Aren't you meant to be at work?"

He shot her a look over his shoulder. "I could say the same to you." He brushed off his hands against the sides of his jeans and then heaved himself back to standing. He let out a sharp huff of a breath and then turned to face her, his hands on his hips. "My meeting was cancelled, so I thought I'd put my back out doing this instead." He jerked his head towards the Christmas tree, all jagged branches, no decorations yet.

She perched against the arm of the couch, her eyebrows arched whilst her gaze settled on the rug. "Well, I yelled at the vice president, then I thought President Dalton was going to fire me but he actually gave me a cup of coffee and a biscuit instead, then Russell sent me home with some Secret Service guy, and I'm kinda hoping it's because he's worried that I'll yell at someone else rather than that there's something going on with the whole assassin thing, so…" She bunched her lips to one side, raised her gaze to meet her father's eye, and gave a stilted shrug.

Her father just stared at her, his eyes wide behind the light-sheened lenses of his glasses.

"Look…I know you're probably still mad at me, and you're probably right to be, but—"

"You yelled at the VP?"

Stevie lowered her voice to a mutter. "And I probably shouldn't have told you that."

"Stevie…" He gripped his brow, and his fingertips rubbed the furrows even deeper. "Look, come here." He gestured towards one of the armchairs and pulled up the other, so that when she perched at the edge of the seat, they sat facing one another. "I'm not mad at you. I know what's happening with Mom is a lot to process, and we're all trying to figure out a way to deal with it, but you can't go around yelling at the VP…or at anyone else for that matter."

"I know." Stevie gave a quick nod. Then her gaze drifted to her lap, to where her fingers knotted together. Her father reached out and laid a tentative hand against her knee. When she dared to look up at him again, her vision had blurred, but she forced a smile and hoped that would be enough to hide it. "And I realise I've been acting a bit childish lately, but I just…I miss her. _So_ much." With the edge of her thumb, she brushed away the stray tear that squeezed out as she frowned. "And then I get angry with her for being like this, even if it isn't her fault, and then I want to push her away, because then maybe it won't hurt so much, but turns out that doesn't work either, and then I try to understand why this happened, but then that makes me feel like I don't even know her at all and that makes me miss her even more."

"I know."

She shook her head, and with finger and thumb, she staunched any more tears before they could sneak out too. "No, you don't."

"Stevie." He stared straight into her eyes. "I know." He let the words linger, giving them extra weight, before he continued. "All those fears, all those thoughts: I have them too. And I don't have the choice to go out and find my own life, because she's it. She's my future. And right now she won't even let the people who are looking after her talk to me, because she wants me to focus on you, and apparently I'm not doing such a great job of that." He broke off the gaze and swept his hand towards the front door. "You're shouting at the VP, Alison's feelings have taken on fabric form, I don't even want ask what Jason's up to."

He shook his head to himself and his eyes took on a faraway look, as though it weren't the staircase that he saw as he stared past her, but instead the bottomless pit of possibilities of just what Jason might be up to, each one more horrifying than the next.

"Everything's a bit of a mess without her, isn't it?"

He let out a huff, and his lips quirked into an almost smile. "You could say that."

"Do you think that part of her would secretly be pleased?"

The smile faded. "No. Not at all." He eased up from his chair and edged through the gap next to the accent table. Stevie pivoted after him as he walked away. With his back to her, he stripped the brown packaging tape from the cardboard box marked 'Xmas Decorations' that balanced on the piano stool, and scrunched it up into a crumpled ball. His voice took on a distance far greater than the two strides that stretched between them. "I think she honestly believes that we should get on with our lives and not give her a second thought."

"How can she think that?"

His shoulders bunched upwards with his breath, and then fell with his sigh. "Because that's what she would want us to do." He shook his head. "She knows what it's like—missing someone—and she wouldn't wish that on anyone, especially not any of us."

Stevie's grip on the mahogany armrest tightened. "You mean because of her parents?"

He shot a look over his shoulder—_Yes._

"Does she ever talk to you about them?"

"Sometimes." He pulled the thread of lights out of the box, unknotting it as he went, and he looped the green wire over his hand like a lasso. "Though normally it takes only a couple of sentences before the high-pitched voice kicks in. But each thing she does tell me gives me a little piece of the story, and it adds up to a lot over the years."

"Does she talk about them with Uncle Will?"

"Sometimes." Another glance over his shoulder. "Though 'talk' isn't exactly the verb I'd use."

Stevie twisted her fist over the armrest, like she were wringing out a cloth. "Doesn't it bother you that she cares about him so much? Enough to get like this."

"In truth?" He stopped feeding the line of lights out from the box, and sought the answer from the edge where the wall met the ceiling. "Yes. It does." He wound the last section of wire around his hand and then carried it over to the tree. "But I've known pretty much from day one that Will was always going to be a factor, and she's never pretended otherwise, so it's not like I'm going to hold that against her now. Besides, their relationship's part of who she is, and as frustrating as it may be at times, I accept it."

He stood in front of the tree and guided the lights onto the branches, looping the wire around the back and passing it from one hand to the other. The sound of the miniature baubles knocking against one another echoed into the room, a staccato that overlay the metronomic clunk of the clock that sat on the mantlepiece.

"I thought we weren't allowed to decorate the tree without Mom."

Her father didn't reply, just continued to feed the lights around in a loose spiral that worked towards the top.

"Whenever Mom was busy or away on work, you said we had to wait until she got back."

"Stevie…" He stepped back from the tree, and then turned to face her, his hands rested against his hips. A kind of fatigue gripped his expression, something that sank deeper than any worry line. "I honestly don't know when Mom will be back."

"I know. I just… I wanted to know why."

He frowned. "Why what?"

With her hands folded over the back of the armchair, she nodded towards the tree. "Why decorating the tree has always been such a big deal to her."

The frown deepened into bemusement.

A flush of warmth tickled her cheeks, and she lowered her gaze to her hands. "Look, when Dalton spoke to me earlier, it made me realise that all the stuff I don't know about Mom, all the stuff that's been bothering me, is because I've never really asked her about it, and it's not like I can ask her about it now, because she's not here."

He spoke slowly and incredulity crept into his tone. "And the Christmas tree has been bothering you?"

"No." She pursed her lips. A paused lingered between them before she shrugged. "I just want to know something, anything, so maybe then I won't feel so…detached."

It was like he had said: if you collected enough pieces, they soon began to add up.

He eyed her for a long moment, as though scanning each word for the meaning hidden beneath. When he seemed satisfied that it wasn't some kind of trap, he gave a curt nod. "Okay."

He skirted around the edge of the armchair and sank down onto the cushion. Stooped forward, with his hands folded loosely in the space between his knees, he stared down at the floor just beyond the toes of his shoes. It looked as though he were steeling himself or thinking through what he was about to say. Then he looked up and met her eye. "After their parents died, Mom and Uncle Will didn't really do Christmas; partly because they were away at boarding school or alone at their aunt's house, partly because it felt pointless when it was just the two of them and it felt less like a celebration and more like a reminder of what they had lost. When Mom went to UVA, she spent her holidays alone in her dorm because she'd rather stay on campus than head back to her aunt's house, and I think by that time she was used to not celebrating. Even after she met me and we got married, I was overseas on active duty most of the time, so she was left alone again and there seemed little point in decorating our apartment either." He shook his head, his gaze turned to the floor. When he stilled and met her gaze once more, a twinkle lit his eyes. "But then I came home, and we had you. And suddenly she had a reason to celebrate." His smile grew, and he gave a soft laugh. "I'll never forget the Christmas just after your first birthday and the look on your face when you saw all the lights and tinsel. You were enthralled. And your mom… Well, you wouldn't believe how happy it made her to see that." He laid his hand on her knee and gave a gentle squeeze. "Having you gave Christmas meaning again, it gave her a reason to celebrate, and once she got that back, she never wanted to give it up. So for her, decorating the tree isn't about the tree, it's about the fact that she has a family, that she has a reason to celebrate, and now, rather than being a reminder of what she lost, it's a reminder of everything she's got."

Stevie's gaze drifted towards the tree. It made sense, seemed obvious even, yet— "I never thought about that."

"Well, fortunately, you've never been in that situation."

She looked to her father again. Determination gripped her tone. "We shouldn't decorate the tree now. We should wait until she comes back."

"I don't know when that'll be."

"It doesn't matter. If it means something to her, we should wait."

"Stevie… She might not be back in time for Christmas. When her therapist spoke to me before, she said it could be weeks, maybe longer. It all depends on whether Mom's engaging or not, and right now, I just don't know what's going on."

Stevie stared down at her skirt, a canvas in black. The look on her mother's face in the photograph Dalton had given her—that flash of unadulterated happiness—filtered through her mind. That was what she wanted, more than anything else, to move forwards towards a time when her mother could be as happy as that again, when her mother _would_ be as happy as that again.

A golden brown crumb still clung to the hem of her skirt. The last trace of the ginger snap, apart from the warmth of the spices that still lingered on her tongue and the words that weaved through her thoughts. _While it's not my place to tell you what she was struggling with before, I can tell you this: she made it where she needed to be in the end. And I'm confident that she'll make it through this too._

Stevie looked up at her father, adamant. "Then we'll do Christmas in January, or in June, I don't care. We have to wait for her."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Henry's POV is coming up soon, I promise. : )**


	59. Chapter Fifty-Seven: caught between a

**Chapter Fifty-Seven**

**…****caught between a rock and a hard place.**

**Elizabeth**

**5:53 PM**

Elizabeth pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, whilst the plastic handset that she pressed to her cheek sweated into the imprint it left on her skin. So, the man who had poisoned her and Will belonged to some isolationist group centred in Moscow, and not only that, but US agents had seen members of the group meeting with known officers of the GRU. Kostov was still at large, likely within US borders, and their only hope was that the Russians would detain and question the members of the group, so that they could get a lead on Kostov's location and establish whether any of his co-conspirators had travelled to the US to assist him. But, of course, Salnikov had been about as cooperative as a vegan in a slaughterhouse, and instead of providing assistance, he had outright denied all knowledge of the group. Which went no way to disproving Conrad's theory that Salnikov was in fact the one behind the order and was using the group as a way to distance the assassination attempt from the Kremlin, so that in the off-chance that it failed and the US somehow traced it back to Kostov, Salnikov could place the blame squarely on the group and decry their actions. And had it been successful…? Well, then there would have been no witnesses. After all, it was only because she had remembered the car and the tattoo and had been able to ID the waiter from the photographs that the investigation had gotten this far. Had it been left to Will to remember anything, the only thing he'd recall would be how her arriving late at the restaurant had somehow inconvenienced him.

The information spun circles through Elizabeth's mind, but one thought rose up above the rest, voiced by Will and stained by the memory of the restaurant: _Isn't it always problems the Russians?_ If only she could go back to that moment, carrying with her what she knew now; maybe then she could have stopped it, or at the very least she could have insisted that he stick to the salmon.

She opened her eyes, and the fluorescent light that hummed through the office pulsed like a migraine against the edge of her vision. Amy sat on the chair behind the desk, her gaze fixed to the blank page of the notepad in front of her whilst she twiddled a biro between her fingers, though she hadn't written a single word in the last ten minutes.

"Wait a second, Russell." Elizabeth lowered the phone from her ear and pressed the mouthpiece to her chest, just below her collarbone. "Amy—" She waited for Amy to look up and blink heavily behind the thick frames her glasses. "Do you think you could give me the room?"

Amy frowned, a slight purse to her lips as she sought understanding.

"Can you give me ten minutes? I need to discuss something. In private."

Amy turned her head from side to side, and her crop of dark hair shimmered with a flare of chestnut beneath the tube lights. "You know we have to monitor your calls, it's standard procedure, and you only have another five minutes left."

Elizabeth stared at her, hard, a look that ought to make any foreign official back down.

A blush crept into Amy's cheeks, and her gaze faltered, but she made no move to leave.

Still Elizabeth stared at her.

The blush deepened. "I'm sorry, it's standard procedure."

"I'll pay you a hundred dollars if you never use that phrase again."

Amy continued to worry the biro between her fingers. "You know that complying with the rules of the programme is one of the conditions of you being signed off. Dr Sherman said—"

"It's not like I'm trying to smuggle alcohol into the clinic, for Pete's sake." Elizabeth's voice strained. She took a breath, huffed it out, and then settled onto the seat opposite Amy. She slid one hand onto the desk, a bridge between them, and she fluttered her fingers against the oak veneer. "Just five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

Amy's lips bunched as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. Her gaze drifted towards the door behind Elizabeth and then back to Elizabeth herself, and it looked as though she were genuinely considering it. After all, was it really too much to ask that she go make herself a cup of tea or find something else to occupy her just for a short while?

But then she shook her head. "I can't. We have these rules for our clients' safety, and—"

"Fine." Elizabeth shrank back from the desk. She didn't have time for this, especially if their debate was whittling down the last of her five minutes. "But this conversation never happened. I'm sure you must have some kind of confidentiality clause hidden amongst all those _procedures_."

She pushed herself to her feet and leant back against the edge of the desk. She lifted the phone to her ear again, whilst she hugged her opposite arm loosely across her chest. "Russell…"

"…Yeah?" Russell's voice stretched back onto the line.

"Look—" She cast a glance over her shoulder.

Amy had returned to staring at the notepad, the pen tapping against the margin.

Elizabeth lowered her voice to a fraction over a mutter. "I know you said they met with GRU officials, but that doesn't mean anything in itself."

"What?" Russell made no effort to restrain his own voice. "So you think they're just socialising? Discussing the various merits of grain versus potato vodka?"

"They might well be. The point is, we don't know."

"Or it could be that's where Kostov got his cover and documents from, not to mention a backstop hefty enough to fool Immigration."

"There's got to be more than one cobbler in Moscow."

"Then how come, not long after the call with Salnikov, our agents in country started reporting activity in the group? Witnessed a live drop between a known GRU official and the group leader. Including cash and passports."

Elizabeth paused. She had to admit, that didn't look good. Her chin dipped, and as she gave a slight shake of her head, strands of her hair swept forward to tickle her cheeks. "Even if the GRU provided them with passports, it doesn't mean that Salnikov ordered the hit."

"GRU officers don't so much as blink without Salnikov's approval." A huff ruffled down the line. "Look, I know you don't want to believe that this came from the Kremlin—"

"Why?" Her head snapped up. "Because that means we'll be back on a footing to war with Russia, we'll never capture the man who almost killed my brother, and if they managed to get to me once, God knows they'll do it again, sooner or later…" Her voice softened whilst the knot at the centre of her chest tightened. "Or they'll get more creative… Henry, the kids—"

"They're safe." Russell cut in. "They're at home with a DS unit watching the house, and I've assigned each of them a Secret Service detail just as a precaution."

"And Will?"

"At home, blissfully unaware that plainclothes officers are watching his every move."

The knot slackened a little, just enough that it no longer felt like each breath was caught in a noose. But her family couldn't live like that, they shouldn't have to live like that, constantly being watched, constantly looking over their shoulders. She swapped the phone to the opposite ear, so that the white cord wrapped across her chest, and with the heel of her hand rested against the desk, she worried the plastic coils between finger and thumb. "Russell, I know what this looks like, but I can't believe Salnikov's behind this."

"What more do you want?" Russell's tone sharpened again. "A voice recording of him saying 'Kill Secretary McCord' to use as your ringtone?"

"Yes." Her eyes bugged. "And if not that, then something equally incontrovertible."

He let out a long sigh, and she imagined that he was massaging his brow, working the furrows deeper with his fingertips. "Elizabeth… You're looking for reason where there's none to be found."

"Even the most irrational people act in ways that are rational to them." She tossed her hand up, and the coils of the cord pinged free. "I mean, why send someone else over here just hours after we've made it clear that we're on to them?"

"Maybe he's getting antsy and wants to get the job done before we find a way to stop him."

"But the whole point of using the group in the first place would to be avoid a link between the attempt and the Kremlin. If you're right, then what he's doing is hardly what you'd call subtle. You'd think he'd at least give it a day or two, or come up with a different plan."

"The guy's not an evil mastermind, for crying out loud."

Elizabeth paused as she let the thought mull through her mind. "You're right, he's not. And he's not that trusting either." She pushed herself away from the edge of the desk, disentangled herself from the cord, and sank down onto one of the chairs. The hard seat pushed up through the thin layer of cushion, a reminder of the pounds she had still yet to regain. "Just assuming for a moment that he _was_ going to do this, don't you think he would take the most direct route possible? Just him and the guy who would get it done."

If it were possible, the arching of Russell's eyebrows seeped into his tone. "And the guy who would kill that guy just to ensure his silence."

"Exactly."

"Look… I agree that the plan's a little convoluted, but that doesn't get away from the fact that it would've been successful, had you not so generously shared the dose with your brother."

"I'm not questioning how they carried it out. I'm questioning why use the group at all. Why not do exact same thing but using someone closer, an actual agent?"

"Maybe he was concerned we might recognise the agent the moment he stepped on US soil."

"Then use an agent we don't know about. We've not got tabs on all of them."

"But if it backfired, it would be a straight link to the GRU and there'd be no doubt that the order came from the Kremlin. At least this provides them with a cushion."

"Then why not let the group take the blame now?" Elizabeth raised her hand from the armrest and her fingers flared.

"Maybe because they haven't been successful yet, and he's trying to buy them more time to make a second attempt, hence the GRU sending reinforcements."

Elizabeth shook her head. "I'm just not buying it."

"Maybe that's because you don't want to buy into it and you're looking for an excuse—one that doesn't implicate the Russian government and thus avoids all the ramifications of that, both at State and for your family."

She drummed her fingers against the armrest. "You think I'm deluding myself."

"Look, we can go around and around in circles over who gave the order, but the fact remains he's refusing to help capture the man who poisoned you, he's actively protecting the group that man is associated with, and his agencies are providing said group with material support." Russell gave a hollow bark of a laugh. "At the very least, he's complicit."

A sound like a rap at the door echoed down the line.

Russell's voice went distant. "What is it?"

A pause.

Then— "I've got to go. POTUS is gathering the NSC to discuss options."

"So patch me in." Elizabeth eased up from the chair again. Amy was glancing at her watch every three seconds. She'd have to find a way to wrangle another five, maybe ten minutes—one that wouldn't result in her being written up for not complying with the rules of the programme.

"I can't."

Elizabeth turned her back, and as she paced along the edge of the desk, she massaged the knots of her neck. "Then get the IT guys to do it, or put me on speakerphone."

"What I meant is technically you're on leave, so you're suspended from the NSC."

Elizabeth stopped dead. "You're kidding me."

"Really, I shouldn't be discussing this with you at all—" There came a pause and a scuffling sound as though Russell were switching the phone from one ear to the other, most likely whilst simultaneously wrestling on his suit jacket. "Just thought I'd extend you the courtesy of an update."

Elizabeth gripped her hip. Her fingertips dug in through the wool of her cardigan. "Well, as thoughtful as that is, it's kind of meaningless if you refuse to take account of my opinion."

"Then tell me what's going on. Give me something solid I can actually take to POTUS, something that isn't based on a gut feeling or wanting to see the good in Salnikov."

Elizabeth stared distantly at the clinic's business card that was pinned to the bottom right-hand corner of the noticeboard, just inside where the two edges of the sea blue corrugated cardboard trimming met. She eased the drawing pin free and caught the card before it slipped, and then pressed the pin back into the cork. With the diagonal corners of the card pressed into the pads of her forefinger and thumb, she turned her back on the desk and perched against the edge. The silhouetted sketch of a tree—a black walnut tree—spidered across the left-hand side of the card, and its branches curved around the address. It tugged a flash of the dream into her mind: rough trenches of tree bark, a black abyss yawning below, the stars floating effortlessly above, fingers scrabbling and outstretched, _Take my hand_…

"Elizabeth?"

She shook her head, and the image succumbed to darkness. She slipped the card into her cardigan pocket. "I don't know yet. I need more time. I need more information."

"Don't we all." There came a muffled clunk. A door closing. "You just focus on getting your head together and getting yourself signed off. Let us worry about Russia."

"Russell." Her voice came as heavy as sigh. "If you're wrong and you so much as threaten Russia, this will seriously damage US-Russian relations, not to mention destroying all chance of capturing Kostov."

He lowered his voice to a hiss. "And if you're wrong, and if we do nothing now, not only does it make us look weak and say that we'll tolerate other countries killing our diplomats, but you could find yourself in a wooden box, six foot under."

She gave a small shrug. "If we don't capture Kostov, that could happen anyway."

"I'd rather we took our chances against one lunatic than sitting back and waiting for a whole horde of them to fly over. We're handling this, Bess. End of discussion."

She opened her mouth, but the line had already cut out. She held the handset away from her ear and studied it for a second, and then she shook her head to herself. The fact that he'd hung up really shouldn't surprise her. She twisted around and clunked the phone back into the cradle. Then she looked to Amy, whose gaze immediately fell to the notepad in front of her as she slid her hand across to cover the single word she had written down: Cobbler. "I bet you're wishing I was smuggling alcohol in now."

"I…" Amy's mouth hung open for an endless second. Then her brow crumpled into a frown. "We're not going to war with Russia…are we?"

"No." Elizabeth gave her the flash of a taut smile, one that belied the jitter at the pit of her stomach. Then, as she turned and padded across the carpet towards the door, she added in less than a mutter, "At least not if I have anything to do with it."

* * *

**6:47 PM**

The nylon carpet brushed and bristled against Elizabeth's bare soles as she ambled back and forth across her bedroom, the folds of her cardigan hugged around her chest, her chin dipped slightly as her gaze traced the path ahead—just focused enough to stop her from bumping into either the single bed or the wall opposite as she let herself succumb to the maelstrom of thoughts. For each argument as to why she should believe that Salnikov had ordered the hit, she could come up with at least two or three counterarguments; but for each counterargument, she could come up with at least two or three rebuttals; and for each rebuttal, she could come up with at least two or three confutations; but for each confutation, she could… And so the cycle went on and on and on, until she found herself back at the original argument, yet even more entrenched in the whys and what-ifs and what-thens, until it truly felt as though she were circling the maelstrom and being sucked ever deeper into the blackened waters that swarmed below, like the shadowy darkness of the room around her.

She came to a stop and slumped down onto the edge of the bed. Her whole body sighed as the mattress dipped beneath her. The light from the fluorescent strips in the corridor outside gleamed off the lenses of Henry's reading glasses, which still sat next to her pair on the bedside table, as though somehow that enabled him to watch over her. She picked them up and rubbed the tips of her thumbs over the crooks of the plastic arms until she generated the heat they had lacked since Henry had last worn them, or perhaps more accurately, the heat they had held from being folded over the front of his crewneck the night he had driven all the way to the clinic just to give her them.

Maybe Russell was right. Maybe she was kidding herself in looking for a different solution. The first time she had asked Henry to loan her his reading glasses, she had tried them on and immediately recoiled at the eye-wateringly distorted world before her. That's what the thought of Salnikov ordering the hit did to her now—made her mind recoil as though she were wearing the wrong prescription. But maybe in truth she just didn't want to see the world through those lenses, because if Salnikov really were behind the attempt, then no matter what Conrad and Russell did, she'd never truly be safe and nor would her family. And that would leave only one option: Quit.

So, maybe Russell was right. Maybe she was kidding herself. And it certainly wouldn't be for the first time in the last few weeks. She had told herself that she'd been ready to go home, she had told herself that she could cope outside the clinic, she had even told herself that if Henry gave her another ultimatum—stay at the clinic or face their marriage unravelling—that she would have been willing to live without him. The thought stung like a splinter buried in her chest, and with each breath, it rent open a hole that flooded with an ache so deep it felt as though it would draw her in and drown her. Another maelstrom. _God, I miss him_. He would know just what to do, what to say to help her figure this out. He would sit behind her and wrap her in his arms and his scent and his warmth until he drew the answer from her.

She closed her eyes, and her thumbs stilled against the frames of his glasses. If she focused hard enough, she could almost feel his chest pressed to her back, his legs against the outside of her thighs, his chin rested to her shoulder, his arms hugged around her. The ache inside softened.

'_What are the facts?_' Henry's voice said. '_And no _a priori _assumptions._'

She ran through them again. And again. And again.

It always came back to one thing: their agents in country had witnessed a known GRU officer providing material support to the leader of the group, including cash and passports. And as Russell had said, the GRU didn't so much as blink unless they were given the go ahead from Salnikov. The director of the GRU might report to the minister of defence and the chief of the General Staff, but ultimately they all answered to the president.

'_But do they?'_ Henry's voice said.

'Of course they do,' she replied.

'_And why do you say that?_'

'Because that's just how it works.'

'_Babe, this only works if you answer the questions properly._'

'Because they have a strict chain of command.'

'_Do they?_'

'Yes. And everything they do has to be approved by the president.'

'_Remember what I said, babe: no _a priori_ assumptions._'

Elizabeth's eyes snapped open. The answer seemed at once both obvious and yet utterly implausible. She placed Henry's glasses down atop the bedside table, the plastic clattering against the oak, and then she grabbed her sneakers from beneath the dressing table stool and tugged them on. Next, she snatched up her black woollen coat from where it draped over the seat of the spindle-back chair in the corner, and she stuffed her arms into the sleeves as she half strode, half shuffled down the corridor, as fast as the laceless sneakers would allow without her tripping.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzzed with an electric jitter that thrummed in time to her thoughts. Either she was right, or totally crazy, or maybe both. But there was only one way to find out. And if she was wrong…? Her stride faltered for a step or two, and the darkness that pressed in through the windows felt as deep as that blackened abyss of the dream. _Fly or fall?_

But life was about taking risks. If she didn't at least try to do something, her family would always be waiting for the next thing to happen, the next average Wednesday that would see their lives spun upside down. People could cope with anything; what was hard was the not knowing, the constant questioning of what would come next. Either way, _fly or fall_, blunt certainty had to be better than a life hazed with doubt.

* * *

With her arms tucked across her chest and pinning the fronts of her coat in place, Elizabeth stole across the deserted reception. The off-yellow lights simmered and the smell of baked potatoes tugged through the air. She headed straight for her DS agent, who stood by the glass doors. "Hey, Matt."

"Good evening, ma'am." Matt gave her a curt nod, and then resumed his impassive stare.

"I need a favour." She cast a quick glance around reception, and then leant backwards and peered along the corridor that led towards the office before she returned to Matt with a smile that was at once hopeful and also braced her for his response. "I need to borrow your phone."

"Ma'am…" He gave her a stern look, one that told her it was totally out of the question. Though he should wait until he heard what she asked for next, assuming that she did manage to get her hands on the phone. "Russell Jackson made it clear that under no circumstances—"

"I'm sure he did, but it's important."

"With all due respect, ma'am, it's always important."

"Well, it's really important." She widened her smile to a plea, and she couldn't say she wasn't above actual begging if that's what it took to persuade him to give her the phone.

Matt let out a huff. "Can't you use the office phone?"

"I've already used up my call for today, and besides—" She shot another look down the corridor, and at the sound of chatter drifting through from the dining room, she lowered her voice. "—if I have them listening in, my plan won't work."

"Ma'am…when you say 'your plan'…?"

"We'll come to that later, but first I need to make a call."

He shook his head. "I've already said—"

"I know, it's against the rules." She held one hand up towards the darkness and December chill that seeped in through the glass and that swathed the cars outside. "But remember when we were in the car on the way to the hospital and you wanted to pull over because it wasn't protocol, but instead you kept going because you knew it could be the difference between life and death?"

He gave her a skeptical look. "Is this the difference between life and death?"

A firm nod. "It could be."

But his look didn't so much as falter.

"I just need to you ignore whatever Russell Jackson said and let me borrow the phone."

"Ma'am, even if I did give you my phone, there's no signal in here."

"There must be signal somewhere."

"Not inside the building."

She paused. Her gaze drifted towards the glass doors and the reflection of the reception desk that overlaid the night beyond. When she returned to him, she spoke slowly, a lilt of optimism lifting her tone. "Then what about _outside_ the building?"

"Ma'am—" His tone warned her.

"Come on, Matt."

He pivoted away from her and shook his head to himself, as though he were questioning why he had ever agreed to be part of her detail or why he hadn't asked for a transfer years ago.

But she continued to press him with that pleading smile.

"You can sometimes get signal on the far side of the car park, away from all the trees. But, ma'am, it really doesn't matter, because you're not allowed to leave the building."

"I know—" She nodded, her expression solemn. But then she jabbed one finger at the air in front of his chest and her smile reignited. "—and that's why you're going to keep watch for me so that no one finds out that I've gone." She tilted her head towards the keypad on the wall, and gave a slight shrug. "And then you can let me back in when I'm done."

"Ma'am…" He stared past her into the distance, perhaps searching out an excuse, any reason he could grasp that would change her mind. He nodded in the direction of the corridor. "You're meant to be going to dinner in five minutes—"

"So I reckon that gives me roughly fifteen before anyone realises I'm not there and goes to check my room." She held out her hand, her palm facing up, her fingers itching for the phone. When he made no move to retrieve it from his jacket pocket, she added, "Matt… You know I wouldn't put you in this position unless I truly believed it was necessary."

His eyebrow quirked as though to say that his definition of 'necessary' might not be entirely the same as her definition of 'necessary'. But then he dipped his hand into his inside jacket pocket, and gave another shake of the head. "If anyone finds out…"

She nodded. "I take full responsibility."

He slapped the phone into her palm. "One call."

"Thank you." She clutched the cell phone to her chest, her smile widening to a grin, and she spun towards the wall behind whilst Matt murmured into his radio and let the agents outside know that she was on her way out. No doubt he'd also grant them full permission to pick her up and drag her back inside if he deemed it 'necessary', though at least he had the sense to wait until she had left the building before communicating that.

Her fingertip hovered over the buttons of the keypad, about to punch in the code, when—

"Ma'am?"

She glanced back over her shoulder, and her smile faltered. Something in Matt's expression had softened, and somehow that was more disconcerting than his usual unimpressed look.

"I don't mean to speak out of turn, but it's been raining outside."

Elizabeth frowned. _What did he mean?_

"The smell."

Elizabeth's expression dropped. _Oh._ A fug of raindrops rising from the sodden concrete, soaring on the updraft of gasoline fumes; her hair plastered to her forehead, whilst with poison coursing through her bloodstream, the first licks of fever began to take hold; Will fitting on the backseat, his lips stone blue and wetted with the froth of blood-tinged saliva.

Her smile felt as fragile as sugar glass. "Thanks, Matt. But I'll be okay."

She didn't have a choice. Tonight, if she was going to stop the White House from taking action that would lead to escalating tensions with Russia and ruin their chances of catching Kostov, she had to be okay. No—more than okay. She had to refuse to let this event define her. She had to choose to take control.

"I'll be fine," she asserted again, though more to herself, more an attempt to ease the tightness that began to twist the pit of her stomach. An eddy of doubt.

With a slight shake unsteadying her finger, she prodded the code into the keypad—C4891X—and the door whooshed open. The chill air held between the two sets of glass doors wafted through and rolled over her. She strode through it, leaving no time for second thoughts. The second door slid aside, and the reflected light that smouldered in the glass gave way to darkness, whilst the crisp rush of the dampened gravel's scent flooded her nose. For a moment, the scent carried her as though she were buoyed on a wave, lifting her feet from the ground below, and it felt as though she didn't know where she'd be when she landed—facing the car park of the clinic, or amidst the tumult of the ambulance bay, watching as the doctors scrambled to help Will.

But the air there was different, colder and thickened with a smokey undertone. With her eyes wide, she forced herself to drink in the scene before her: the rumpled quilt of clouds above, almost blue with the moonlight behind; the branches of the black walnut tree lurching with each breath of the breeze, and the way that they creaked and groaned; the rabbits that bumbled and scuffled in the wilted grass at the edge of the car park, their tails bright white in the night gloom.

Definitely the car park, not an ambulance bay.

She tapped the phone number into the screen of Matt's cell, and used the backlight glow and the haze that spilled out from the clinic to guide her as she strode across the car park. Each step elicited a scrunch from the gravel. The words 'No Service' glared back at her, almost taunting, and her heartbeat quickened a fraction. She didn't have a plan B. This had to work.

A clunk echoed out as a couple of the DS agents opened the doors of the SUV parked near the grassy island, beneath the reach of the black walnut tree. They climbed out, and their footsteps rasped through the air too as they crossed the car park to join her by the split-rail fence that curved along the side furthest from the tree-lined track that meandered away from the clinic building.

"Ma'am." One of them pointed towards a particular post. "Try standing there."

Elizabeth stood next to the post and stared down at the screen.

No Service. No Service. No Service.

_Come on_, she muttered to herself. Though she couldn't be sure whether the urgency that jittered through her like an itch on the inside of her skin came from the fear of time running out, or from the fear that she might lose her nerve.

And as the seconds sailed up into the night, she couldn't be sure if she even wanted to find a signal at all. Perhaps the lack of a signal was a signal in itself: a signal that she was wrong, a signal that she should stop now, before she risked her life on a hunch.

One bar lit up on the screen. The phone connected to the network.

She froze, her thumb poised over 'Call'. Either way, if she was wrong and she made the call, or if she was right and she did nothing now, the outcome would be the same. As Russell had so eloquently put it: her in a wooden box. And either way, if she was right and she made the call, or if she was wrong and she did nothing now, the outcome could be the same. She might have no choice other than to quit. Whoever came up with the phrase 'caught between a rock and a hard place' had obviously forgotten about the spikes that pressed down from above and the pit of vipers that yawned below. Was this how Henry had felt when deciding whether to give her and Will the antidote?

The thought brought a sting to her chest, sharper than the bite in the air around her, sharper than the hurt in his eyes when she'd told him he shouldn't have given her the antidote at all. She should never have put him through that—the choice, nor the blame.

'_Babe, you've got to stop thinking so much. Just do what you feel is right._'

Two bars lit up on the screen.

She knew what her gut told her, and had it not been for the doubts that Russell had sown in her and the way that her confidence in her own thoughts and feelings had been shaken over the past few weeks, she wouldn't have paused half as long. She could only hope that, whatever happened, this decision wouldn't see Henry facing a similar choice again.

She hit call and lifted the phone to her ear. The line rang, and rang, and rang.

"Good evening, this is—"

"Blake, it's me."

"…Ma'am…?"

"Is Jay still there? I need to speak to him. It's urgent."

Blake's voice stretched away on the other end of the line. "I think he's just heading towards the elevator, do you want me to—"

"Then go stop him." Her eyes widened.

"…Right." There came a clatter of the handset hitting the wooden desk.

She waited.

She waited.

She waited.

The cold bit through the soles of her sneakers and into the tips of her toes. She ground her toes into the gravel, trying to fend off the sting, and she hugged her coat tighter around her as the chill snuck through the woollen folds.

There came a faint shout down the line—Blake calling Jay's name, once and then again.

And then nothing.

In the darkness and the enveloping hush, the pace of time distorted. It felt as though a second took an hour to pass, but an hour only a minute. The lights that flooded through the windows on the upper levels of the clinic began to blink out, and the red brick that surrounded them turned to black. Moments later, glimpses of the other patients flashed across the windows of the stairwell as they descended towards reception and the dining hall beyond. Inside the glass doors, Matt cast a glance around reception and then tucked his chin towards his shoulder and murmured into his radio.

"_Bluebird has five minutes_." His voice crackled through the radios of the two DS agents who stood with their backs to Elizabeth, no more than three paces away. "_Five minutes_."

One of the agents shot her a look over his shoulder.

She gave a nod. "I heard."

_Come on, Jay, come on. _She turned her back on the agents, careful not to move from the spot in case she lost that tentative connection with the outside world, and she gripped the uppermost slat of the split-rail fence. Though the slat was bristled with splinters, the damp that had seeped into the wood left it supple, almost smooth to the touch, and it sharpened its scent; a burst of freshness, something as primal as the carefree days of childhood spent playing amidst the dew-damp grasses and clambering over rain-sodden trees that a midnight storm had felled in the forest near her first home. She felt as dependent on others now as she had been on her parents back then, and she felt as powerless now as she had been in the moment when she had learnt what pain such dependence could spawn. _Come on, Jay, come on._

Another clunk. Then heavy breaths ruffled down the line. Blake's voice. "Ma'am?"

Her grip on the wood tightened. "Did you catch him?"

"I did."

"And…?" _Please don't let this be his night with Chloe. Please._

"I'll patch you through."

Her eyes slipped shut, a silent sigh of relief. "Thank you, Blake."

A pause. She dug her nails into the wood.

"Hello…? Ma'am…?" Jay's voice.

"Hey, Jay… I need your help."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	60. Chapter Fifty-Eight: say one thing fo

**Chapter Fifty-Eight**

**…****say one thing for Elizabeth McCord.**

**Jay**

**7:03 PM**

Jay swatted the button next to the elevator, and then stepped back and rested his hand against the rough canvas of his satchel, the strap of which slung snug across his chest. He drummed his thumb against the metal loop of the strap whilst the numbers on the digital display above the elevator clunked their way up. _2…3…4…5… _It wasn't too late in the evening. Maybe he could go for a run. With his headphones blaring, a fast enough pace, and a bitterness to the air that was bound to burn through his lungs, perhaps it would be enough to drown out all thought.

"Jay!" Blake's shout came from behind him. "Excuse me… Sorry… Jay!"

Jay spun around, his fist closing around the strap of his bag, just as Blake skidded towards him. The rubber soles of Blake's dress shoes screeched across the floor in a way that jarred the nerves in Jay's neck and crawled into the base of his skull, and he gave an involuntary shudder. "Blake… What is it?"

Blake's fingers fanned across his hip, the other hand held up in a signal to hold that thought for just one second whilst he stooped forward and sucked in a breath. He straightened up again, and smoothed out any creases that might have crept into his blazer. "The secretary's on the line for you."

Jay's brow furrowed, and he motioned down the corridor towards Secretary Cushing's office. "The secretary? But I just spoke to him, like, ten min—"

"No. The real Madam Secretary," Blake said and then stopped. His eyes glazed over as though a still frame from '_It_' had just flashed across his vision. "Wow. Now, that's a horrifying rap parody just waiting to be written."

"But…isn't she meant to be on leave?"

Blake snapped back to attention. "How about we leave stating the obvious for later?" He held one arm out and ushered Jay down the corridor. "She said it's urgent."

The elevator dinged.

Jay glanced back as the doors trundled open and invited him home—or to his apartment, at least—and to a rest from all that was State. "What can be urgent at a clinic?"

"I don't know. But here's an idea: If you pick up the phone, perhaps you could ask her."

Jay stared longingly towards the elevator. Was one evening too much to ask? Really?

Then he let out a stream of a sigh and returned to Blake as the doors juddered shut once more and the elevator lurched away, empty, and no doubt carrying with it his hopes of a stress-free evening. Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she had impeccable timing.

He shook his head to himself in a silent grumble, and trudged back along the corridor towards his office. What exactly she meant by 'urgent', he couldn't imagine, but something told him he wouldn't want to find out.

* * *

The glow of the office lights warmed from cool yellow to achingly white. Jay unslung his bag from across his chest and dumped it on one of the chairs in front of his desk, and then snatched up the phone from its cradle. Plastic rattled against plastic. "Hello…? Ma'am…?"

"Hey, Jay," the secretary said. "I need your help."

Jay edged around the desk and sank onto his office chair. "No offence, ma'am, but aren't you meant to be at a…" _Engage tact_. "…treatment facility, with no phone?"

"I am. And technically, yes. But I managed to wrangle one from my detail. Only there's practically no signal here, so I'm currently freezing my ass off in the car park, praying that this call doesn't cut out and that the staff here don't realise that I've slipped away, so you'll have to forgive me if we skip the niceties."

The stream of words poured out, and it was almost enough to wash away the memory of the woman he and Kat had seen the night they had visited the secretary at her home; the woman who had been swamped in the secretary's clothes whilst she drowned herself in coffee and all but yelled at her husband, only to shrink in on herself a moment later and insist that she didn't deserve him at all, until like a bulb dimming, her inner light had switched off and she spaced out, and then failed to return.

Almost.

Some stains were stubborn like that.

"I see," Jay said, whilst his gaze whistled out through the glass wall of the office to where Matt and Kat barrelled along the corridor, their suit jackets flapping open from their momentum, whilst Blake strode a buttoned-up two paces behind.

Matt curled his fingers around the edge of the glass and leant into the doorway. He nodded towards the phone. "Hey. Blake said MSec's on the line."

"Is that Matt?" the secretary asked.

"Yes," Jay said, "and Kat and Blake are here too."

"Oh, good. Put me on speaker."

Jay flapped his fingers towards his palm and motioned for the three of them to come in, though given their half eager, half concerned expressions he'd probably have a hard time keeping them out. They stepped inside, and as Blake guided the door into its frame with a judder that shook through the glass, Jay hit the speaker button on the base of the phone and then put the handset down.

"Hey, ma'am." Matt leant towards the phone as he lifted Jay's satchel from the chair and then placed it on the floor. He took a seat and edged the chair closer to the desk.

"Evening, ma'am." Kat pulled up the other chair.

"Hey," the secretary said. "I miss you guys."

"The feeling's mutual," Blake called over his shoulder as he grabbed the spare chair from the corner of the room. He centred it behind Matt's and Kat's seats, and then freed the button of his blazer as he sat down.

"So," Jay said, "what exactly do you need help with?"

"Stopping the US from going to war with Russia."

The lightness in the air dropped, along with everyone's expressions, and a look swept between them like a game of Pass the Bomb. _What did she just say?_ And, _What the hell was going on?_

"Right. Either you're all looking at each other like you think I'm totally nuts, or you've all upped and left. Either way, I wouldn't blame you."

Matt pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "We're still here, ma'am."

"But a little context would be helpful." Jay gave a slight wince as he folded his arms atop the desk, bowed his head, and braced himself for whatever was to come next. Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she knew how to make a statement and she was certainly never dull.

"As I said, the signal's rubbish here, bad enough to make Russell Jackson moan like a teenager without wifi—though, come to think of it, they don't have that here either—and I probably only have five minutes before the staff realise that I've gone and they put me on lockdown or whatever it is that they do to non-compliants—possibly shove me in a hole—so we're going to have to take this at a sprint, okay?"

Matt grinned. "The running spikes are on, ma'am."

"Good… So, the man who poisoned me and my brother belongs to some isolationist group out of Moscow. They call themselves the 'Protectors of Mother Russia'—"

Blake snorted. "Catchy."

Matt shrugged. "It has a certain imperialistic charm."

"Long story short," the secretary continued. "They seem to think that I'm the architect of all evil and that their lives and the whole of Russia would be better off if I were dead."

"I'm sure it's nothing personal, ma'am."

A huff of a laugh ruffled through the speaker. "Anyway, the IC reported meetings between members of the group and officers in the GRU, but nothing incriminating, just your usual chess and vodka. POTUS reached out to Salnikov asking for assistance with the investigation, but Salnikov outright denied everything, including the existence of the group."

Kat settled forward in her seat. She gave a disapproving shake of the head. "That's hardly unexpected."

"But then, after the call, a GRU officer was seen providing the group with cash and passports. Now, the White House are convinced this is evidence that the Kremlin are behind the hit."

"Well, if the GRU are involved," Matt said, "ultimately it must have come from Salnikov."

He cast a look around the others, as though to make sure that they agreed with that assessment. Kat nodded, whilst Blake stared distantly towards the floor, his lips fixed in an anxious pout—it looked as though he might start chewing his fingernails at any moment.

Jay rubbed his brow. Though he'd rather that the Kremlin weren't involved, especially given the ramifications of that for US-Russian relations, he couldn't deny it— "Barring Salnikov coming out and making a public statement, you're not going to get more definitive proof than that."

"That's what Russell said."

Jay paused, and then frowned at the phone. "But you disagree?"

"What's the square root of sixty-four?"

With mouths open, they all shared a bemused look. _What, exactly, was she getting at?_

"Ma'am…?" Jay prompted after the silence had lingered.

"Just humour me."

Matt tossed one hand up. "Eight."

"Right… And?"

The bemused looks deepened. Matt leant back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. The wrinkle in his brow seemed to speak for all of them, or at least echoed with Jay's own thoughts. _Seriously, what was she getting at? And what did she mean by 'And'?_

But for Blake, at least, realisation dawned. "Minus eight."

"Exactly." The secretary's voice shot up, and a glimmer of excitement—or perhaps the spark that's struck when two minds connect—lit her tone. "But no one ever thinks of that because they automatically jump to the obvious solution and forget there's an alternative that's equally valid. I mean, I was a math major, but even I have to remind myself of that."

"So, what aren't we thinking of here?" Kat's frown remained as she stooped forward in her seat, her gaze fixed on the phone.

"The only concrete piece of evidence that we have to link the Kremlin with the hit is this meeting between the GRU and the group, where they're seen handing over material support."

Jay waited for the punch, for the moment when she'd tell them something they didn't already know, something that would absolve the Kremlin rather than just reaffirming their guilt. When it didn't come, he arched an expectant eyebrow at the phone. "And your point is…?"

"Salnikov knows that we know the group has ties to the GRU, and that we suspect that's where they got their false documents from enabling them to come to the US, and he knows that we're watching the group because POTUS said as much in the call, yet straight after speaking to POTUS, he sends the GRU out to hand deliver more documents in a live drop for anyone and everyone to see, so of course we see the obvious solution: the Kremlin are behind the hit and they know that we're on to them, so they're ramping up their plan while buying themselves some time with a heavy dose of denial. But what's the other solution, the one we're not thinking of?"

A long pause whined through the room. After all, just because the square root of sixty-four had two solutions, it didn't mean that the evidence in an assassination investigation pointed in two directions. Perhaps all it indicated was that the Russians weren't the only ones who were in denial…

"Maybe he doesn't really know that we're watching them?" Blake offered.

With his arms folded across his chest, Matt shrugged and cast a half-glance in Blake's direction. "Or maybe he just doesn't care because he knows we can't stop them."

Kat shook her head to herself, her arms rested along the length of her thighs, whilst the nick in her brow suggested she was still trying to puzzle it out. "Or it could be a total head fake and he's running some kind of triple game."

"Getting warmer with the last one," the secretary said, and then she added, "though, let's try to bear in mind that the guy's not Blofeld."

"Well, he's certainly not half Greek, half Polish." Matt smirked.

Blake arched his eyebrows whilst his eyes took on a faraway glaze. "And I'm guessing that he doesn't have a Chinchilla cat."

Jay shot them a look. "Perhaps getting a little distracted there, guys."

"Wait…" Kat's face lit up, and she pushed herself up from her stoop. But less than half a moment after the light bulb flicked on, it went BAM. "You think the GRU have gone rogue?"

"Exactly." The secretary sounded far too enthused, given the implications of that.

"Well, that's terrifying." All lightness had fled Matt's expression too.

Blake's middle finger crept towards his mouth, his nail poised for biting.

His anxiety was understandable. Kremlin-sanctioned GRU killers were bad enough, but GRU killers with no one to answer to…? And that didn't even factor in their use of an ideological group.

Jay closed his eyes and rubbed his brow, though the furrows that had taken hold refused to budge. Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she thought outside the box and the thoughts that she thought were half-wild, half-genius and all trouble. So much for a quiet evening… But then again, he couldn't deny that this was perhaps the most engaged he'd felt at work since the day she'd failed to show up after that lunch with her brother, and a madcap conspiracy theory had to be better than another night spent worrying about the situation at home.

He took a deep breath and then brought his hands together beneath his chin, his elbows propped against the desk. "That could certainly explain why Salnikov was being so defensive. If he had anything other than absolute control, he wouldn't want anyone to find out, especially not the US."

"Sorry…" Blake frowned and held up one hand. "But even if the GRU have gone rogue and are helping this group, or just using them, why advertise the drop to us?"

"Think about it," the secretary said. "If Salnikov knows that they've gone rogue, he'll be doing everything he can to root it out, as quietly as possible of course."

It began to dawn on Jay. This was where the hypothetical war with Russia came in. "So the group and the rogue element of the GRU will be feeling the time pressure too."

"But if we were to think we had proof that the hit was ordered by the Kremlin, we'd be forced to retaliate," the secretary said, "first with sanctions and expulsion of their diplomats, which I'm guessing is what the NSC are proposing right now."

Kat's eyes widened a fraction as it dawned on her too. "But Russia will never publicly admit what's happened, certainly not that the plot was supported and potentially concocted by a rogue element of the GRU, which means they'll be forced to retaliate against our retaliation in order to save face and to give their denial at least an air of credibility. Which could lead to escalation as we retaliate against their retaliation against our retaliation."

Jay gave a sour smile. He shrank away from the edge of the desk and slumped back in his chair. "And we're back to mutually assured destruction."

Matt raised his eyebrows. "Or mutually assured _distraction_."

Kat nodded to his comment. "If the group are still motivated to carry out the hit, the escalation would give them just the cover that they need to make another attempt."

"And if they succeed this time," Jay said, "it'll drive a huge wedge between the US and Russia, regardless of whether the Kremlin were responsible or not."

Matt met his eye. "I'm guessing that meets all their S.M.A.R.T. goals."

Jay gave a small shrug and he pivoted back and forth in his chair. "Could even give them the opportunity to oust Salnikov."

"Assuming that they have totalitarian designs."

Blake leant forward into the gap behind Matt and Kat, one finger raised in interjection. "But Salnikov must realise this is what will happen if he doesn't say something now."

Kat hooked her elbow over the back of the chair and twisted around to face Blake. "Salnikov would deny Russia into a mushroom cloud before admitting that the GRU have gone rogue."

Matt turned his chin towards his shoulder, rather than twisting all the way around too. "Maybe he doesn't believe that the US would ever act without firm proof."

"And maybe he doesn't know that we've seen the GRU providing the group with material support." Jay paused, and then arched his hand atop the desk. "If this happened shortly after the call, it could be that there's a mole high up, someone who'd make sure that he didn't know."

"So," the secretary said, "on a scale from one to totally out of my mind, how crazy do I sound? Trying to forget the fact that I'm currently hiding in a car park outside a mental health clinic, calling you on a contraband phone."

Matt deadpanned. "Exactly how high does that scale go?"

Kat leant forward again, and with her elbows propped atop her thighs, she brought her hands together, her index fingers rested lightly to her lips. "It could explain why Salnikov's acting the way he's acting, and it could account for what we know."

Matt watched her as she spoke, and then turned back to the phone. "But there's always the chance that Salnikov does want you dead and is just really dumb."

A silence drifted between them. It was easy to get wrapped up in the conspiracy, to see how it all came together, to believe in it even, but Matt was right, the alternative was equally plausible, and sometimes the most obvious—if undesirable—answer was the correct one.

"Look…I know there are a lot of coulds and maybes," the secretary said, "but I've turned this over in my head at least a hundred times, and my gut tells me that I'm right."

Another pause.

Blake opened his mouth, but his lips tensed as though he were having second thoughts about what he was about to say—or perhaps not what he would say, but what the answer might be and whether he wanted to hear it. "Do the FBI know where the assassin is now?"

"Best guess?" the secretary said. "Still here, just waiting for an opportunity."

Matt gave a snort. "So, no pressure then."

"If we can just get the Russians on board by getting them to admit what's going on and getting them to give us the information we need to stop the group before they make another attempt, we can prevent this whole situation from escalating."

But they couldn't even get the Russians on board when it came to negotiations over the BSR, and that didn't involve revealing a conspiracy or problems at the Kremlin.

Jay raised his eyebrows whilst a somewhat pessimistic smile played on his lips. "You make it sound so simple."

"Well," the secretary said, "I guess that must be all the uppers they've got me on."

The room prickled with an awkward silence whilst they all shared a look. Matt opened his mouth to speak, but Kat cut him a sharp glare and shook her head—a motion telling him to zip it.

"Okay, that was meant to be a joke," the secretary said. "God, you have one teeny breakdown and everybody gets so serious."

Matt clutched one arm of the chair and edged forward in his seat. A frown had settled across his brow. "About that, ma'am… How are you feeling?"

"Getting there…" Her tone was a touch heavier than before, as though imbued with a sigh, a slight tug of exhaustion. "I mean, I'm pretty sure that failing to comply with the rules will push back me being signed off, but it'll be easier to focus knowing that we're not going to war with Russia and that the people responsible have been caught." There came a pause and the buzz of voices in the background; it sounded like static over a radio. "Look, I know how impossible it sounds, but I have a plan that might just work."

Matt's expression turned determined. "What do you need us to do?"

"I need a face-to-face meeting with Minister Avdonin."

Jay stared at the phone, not sure if he had heard her quite right, but then as the words sank in, he shook his head. "Ma'am…borrowing a phone and slipping out to the car park is one thing, but I'm pretty sure they'd miss you if you were to drive off."

"I know," she said, "and that's why you're going to tell him to come here."

Kat drew her chin back, and her eyes widened. "Ma'am—"

"I know. Crazy, right? But we have a rapport and I think I can reason with him, get him to make Salnikov see sense. I mean, we managed to hash out the nuclear de-alerting together…"

Jay scrubbed one hand over his face. That idea wasn't just half-wild; it was totally insane.

As though she could sense that thought, she continued, "Trust me, I've gone through all the possible outcomes and I honestly believe that this is the least bad option, for the country and for my family… Here, write this down."

Matt grabbed a pen from the pot at the front of the desk, and he snatched up a piece of paper—what had been the cover page for the East Africa report. He leant over the desk and scribbled down the address that she read out once and then again.

"That's where I'm staying." Her voice faded slightly, the line becoming choppy, and then it droned as it returned twice as loud before once again evening out. "Please just set it up."

Other voices echoed down the line.

"I need to go." A crackle. "DS are getting antsy, and someone's gone to check my room."

Jay surged up from his chair. With his fists pressed to the wood, he hunched over the desk. "Ma'am…if we do this and you're wrong."

"I know the risk…" The line screeched. "…and I'm prepared to take it… Just set it up… I've got to go."

"Ma'am—"

The call cut out.

A breathless pause. Then the _bleep-bleep-bleep_ of the disconnected line blared through the office. It deepened the surrounding silence and brought a thickness to the hush, until it felt as though each second that passed had been woven into a blanket that smothered the room.

Jay hung up, and then perched right at the edge of his chair, his elbows propped against the desk, his hands folded together and rested to his mouth and chin. Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she was more than just talk and she was less than risk-averse.

The pinch in Blake's brow tightened, and he continued to stare distantly at the phone. "Just to be clear… When she says it's the least bad option for the country and for her family…?"

Jay unclasped his hands and then brought them back together again. "If she's right, she can prevent war—or at least escalating tensions—between the US and Russia, and they'll be able to put a stop to this group before they make another attempt; if she's wrong, she gives the White House the definitive proof they need to retaliate, and by giving away her location, the assassin will focus on her rather than going after her family instead."

Matt met Jay's eye with a solemness that seemed like a shadow to his usual self. "So, if we do this and she's wrong…" He motioned to the phone and then looked to the others. "…we're basically sending up a flare for the assassin and anyone else the Kremlin decide to send over?"

Kat's breath deflated in a long sigh. "And I can't say that letting the Russians know that she's at a clinic will be too hot for her career-wise either."

Jay gave a bitter smile. "Why go digging for kompromat when we deliver it straight to them?"

Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she wasn't a politician.

The silence stretched until it wore thin. Matt cast a glance around the room, one that bounced off each of them in turn. "So, what do we do?"

Kat shook her head. "If we take it to the White House, they'll never sanction the meeting."

Jay's lips quirked to one side. "And I get the feeling that Minister Avdonin is more likely to listen to the secretary than to POTUS."

The silence returned. With other members of staff strolling past the windows of the office, chatting to one another whilst they pulled on their coats and snugged on their scarves, and with the lilt of their voices seeping through the glass, it seemed to magnify both the quiet inside the room and the weight of the decision that pressed down upon them all.

Blake eased up from his chair. He stepped around it and then folded his hands over the back. A line of tension radiated all the way up from his fingertips and into his shoulders; it even deepened the frown that marred his brow. His gaze remained fixed on the seat. "She says she knows the risk. She's depending on us. If there's a chance that she's right, we've got to help her." His gaze flicked up; it darted from Kat to Matt to Jay. "I say we go with the secretary's plan."

Kat leant back in her seat. Her eyebrows arched, her lips remained downturned. "It's crazy…but some of the best plans are." She nodded to Jay. "I'm with the secretary."

Matt raised his shoulders in a shrug that didn't fall and he shook his head, his gaze turned to the floor. "I don't know if she's right or not, but I trust that she knows what she's doing." He stilled and looked to Jay. "I'm with the secretary."

All three of their gazes burned over Jay, like flames held too close to the skin. Under that heat, he averted his own gaze. What the secretary was asking them to do went against all protocol, it obliterated the chain of command, it put her life—and her career—at risk and all because of a hunch. Six weeks ago, he had been the secretary's guy, he had been St Jay patron of the long shot (as much as the nickname made him cringe), and he would have backed any plan she could come up with, no matter how crazy it might sound. But then she had checked out. She couldn't cope, she had failed to return to work, she had tried to leave the clinic even though she knew that to do so would be forfeiting her job. The secretary he knew, the one who would get his vote when she finally admitted that she wanted to run, had gone. And with her went their legacy and their future plans.

Perhaps it would have been easier to draw a line under the notion of a McCord White House and to admit that dream would never come to pass. No longer being tethered to DC would certainly make it easier when deciding how to handle Abby's resolution to head California, Chloe in tow, and it could resolve the deadlock they found themselves in now. But listening to the secretary as she spoke on the phone, and just knowing that she had wrangled the phone from her detail as part of another madcap plan, told him what he at once both wanted to hear and would rather deny: She was getting better, and one day soon, he would have to choose between his daughter and his job.

But that decision was for another day.

"Jay," Matt said.

Jay's gaze snapped up.

Matt met him with a pointed stare. "Are you in or not?"

Five days ago, Matt and Kat had been sitting right where they were now when Jay had told them that they couldn't keep treating the BSR deal like a symbol, but perhaps in truth, just like the decision whether to support her plan or not, that's what it really was. A symbol. Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she was a fighter, say she did what was right no matter the personal cost.

Jay gave Matt a small smile. "It's the secretary or nothing, right?"

Matt's lips eased into a grin. One that said: _Welcome back._

Jay nodded to Blake. "Blake, set up the call."

* * *

The image of Minister Avdonin sat at his desk, jostling documents together into a rough pile, flickered onto the screen at the end of the communications rooms. Avdonin paused for one second and let his gaze flit up to the camera. "This better be good."

Stood at the head of the table, Jay clutched the back of the chair in front of him, his fingertips pitting into the leather. "Minister Avdonin, good evening to you too."

"My plane leaves for Moscow in—" Avdonin pushed up the sleeve of his suit jacket and glanced at his watch. "—three hours, so you'd better make this quick."

Matt pivoted back and forth in his seat. "Yeah…you're gonna want to miss that flight."

Avdonin stopped sorting the documents and stared at the screen.

"The secretary has requested a face-to-face meeting," Jay said. "Tonight."

"I wasn't aware that the secretary had returned from her mysterious absence."

Jay shrugged. "Just one of the things I'm sure she's keen to discuss."

A glimmer of intrigue, or perhaps opportunity, flashed across Avdonin's expression before he had a chance to quash it. He rocked back in his office chair and drummed his fingers against the armrest, feigning an air of nonchalance. "And where might this hypothetical meeting take place?"

* * *

A faint afterglow burned through the lights of Jay's office before they simmered into grey. He took one last glance around, though if someone had asked him what he was checking for, he wouldn't have been able to tell them; perhaps it was just a way to soak up the last ghost of conversation that lingered in the air before he returned to the inevitable silence of home. He eased the strap of his satchel onto his shoulder, and then stepped out into the corridor and guided the door shut. The glass rattled softly as the door slotted back into the frame.

"Hey."

Matt's voice chased him down the corridor, and he spun around.

Matt hiked his thumb towards the offices behind whilst he continued to stride towards Jay, the fronts of his suit jacket flapping. "Blake eventually managed to get through on the landline. He let MSec's detail know that the plan's a go."

"I'm sure they're thrilled."

Matt smiled, and gave a shrug. "She'll find a way to win them round."

Jay clutched the strap of his bag as they ambled along the corridor together and towards the elevators. "Running rings around DS, a plan to strong-arm Avdonin…?"

"Looks like natural order's been restored." Matt's smile lingered at full glow for a moment or two before it softened a fraction. At least he had the decency not to say 'I told you so', though no doubt that would come sooner or later. It always did. Instead, he alternated his paces with shooting Jay sideways glances. "Look, the rest of us were planning to camp out in the conference room, wait for any news. Why not join us? … That is, if you've not got any plans."

Jay came to a stop in front of the lifts. The display above said that the elevator was already there and waiting, just one swat of the button and the doors would trundle open and he could head back home. But his hand remained clutched around the strap of his bag, reluctant to let go.

"We were gonna order takeout…" Matt said.

Still Jay didn't move.

"Maybe sneak in a few beers."

Jay glanced over his shoulder towards the office. There was something about the stillness of the silence, interrupted only by the bubble of Kat's laugh, and the way that the darkness pressed in through the windows making the lights inside burn all that much brighter, that brought about a change in the air and lent the workplace a certain warmth, the same way that a city walked during the day could feel like a humdrum churning of sidewalk and breeze blocks, but by night could become something special, as though every light that glowed was a soul and every inch of hush held a secret crafted especially for you.

"Come on." Matt jerked his head towards the conference room. "It'll be fun."

Jay shrugged, as though it really didn't bother him either way, as though he hadn't just realised that there was no need to step in the elevator if he wanted to go home. "Sure. Why not?" And as they walked back through the rows of desks—each abandoned and lamps dimmed—and towards the glow of the conference room, he shot Matt a quick look and the barest hint of a smile. "Though…just promise me we're not having Stroganoff."

Matt chuckled, clapped Jay on the shoulder, and then let his hand linger there, guiding him forward.

It was meant to be an early evening, one free from stress, but instead of an empty apartment and a microwave dinner, Jay found himself in the conference room surrounded by his colleagues and friends, sipping from a bottle of beer and sharing slices of pepperoni pizza from a grease-mottled box; instead of mulling over worries about his daughter and where her future would take her, he spent the whole night up with the others, waiting for the phone to ring with a call bearing news about their boss; instead of going for a run with music blaring and a pace fast enough to pound out his thoughts, they reminisced about the secretary's other crazy yet somehow successful plans and whether she intended on a different kind of run or not.

Say one thing for Elizabeth McCord, say she'd make a fine president one day, though only if she wanted it—and only if she survived long enough.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	61. Chapter Fifty-Nine: laces

**Chapter Fifty-Nine**

**…****laces.**

**Elizabeth**

**Tuesday, 4th December, 2018**

**12:06 AM**

"_They're here_." The voice crackled through the radio of the agent who sat on the spindle-back chair tucked into the corner of the room, out of sight from the window set into the door.

The agent, a fellow blonde with a similar build to Elizabeth, had been drafted in during the shift change and had been waiting with Elizabeth for the past half hour or so. Amongst the things she had brought with her were a spare pair of shoelaces, just one of Matt's conditions if they were to go ahead with the plan, and it was these that Elizabeth tied up now as she stooped forward a little stiffly where she perched at the edge of the mattress. They were wiry, black laces—the kind that belonged to dress shoes—rather than the broad, white laces that suited Elizabeth's sneakers, but they'd do. Better than having her shoes slip off with every step, even if it looked the equivalent to belting up her jeans with a power cord.

"_Hallways clear. Bluebird's good to go._"

The buzz of the voice over the radio hummed through Elizabeth and it lit in her a thrill that fizzled along her nerves with the same static edge; it was enough to silence the niggle of doubt to no more than a whisper swirling at the pit of her stomach. She had always accused Will of being an adrenaline junky—which, of course, he was—but she couldn't deny there was nothing quite like the hit of a covert op, and it was perhaps the most alive she'd felt since that day at the restaurant, or perhaps even since the moment she'd learnt they'd been taken off Code Night Watch. Life was about risks—calculated risks—and the more she'd thought about it over the past few hours, the more she'd convinced herself that this one would pay off.

"You ready, ma'am?" The agent rose from the chair. In the darkness of the room, with the dim fluorescence from the hall floating in through the window slats, she'd pass for Elizabeth easy enough, especially at a cursory glance.

Elizabeth tugged the double bow tight, and then eased to her feet. "Ready."

Win over Avdonin. Prevent escalating tension between the Kremlin and the White House. Capture Kostov. Simple. Or at least, nothing that the old Elizabeth couldn't pull off.

* * *

A sheet of drizzle hung in the air, not enough to wet Elizabeth and her agents as they walked, but enough to prickle against Elizabeth's face and fluff her hair and leave beads of moisture clinging to the wool of her coat. The _scrunch, scrunch, scrunch_ of their footsteps through the gravel lifted into the night, along with the fog of each breath, and the sound drifted through the trunks of the paper birches that lined the track.

At the end, a black SUV had pulled up inside the grey stone pillars of the gate. When the group neared, the car doors opened and an asynchronous clunk echoed up. Minister Avdonin and his own security detail—four men, all in black suits, just like her own agents—climbed out. They waited in the pool of light that flowed down from the beacons atop the pillars, a patch of hazy yellow with the darkness pressing in around. How well they could see Elizabeth and her agents as they stared out into the valley of black between the birches, Elizabeth didn't know, but it looked as though they were sizing them up, like a showdown in one of those old westerns that Henry liked to watch.

"Ma'am…" Matt began, and his voice dragged. "I feel I ought to remind you that this is strictly against protocol."

"I'm aware." Elizabeth hugged her coat around her and tucked her hands beneath her elbows to keep the cold from biting into her fingertips. "But we're doing this, Matt."

"When the White House find out…"

"I take full responsibility."

"I'd still prefer it if you'd turn back."

"I know you would." She pivoted towards him, and as a lilting breeze swept over them and swished through the branches of the birch trees, she curled her fists even tighter. "But we've gone through this, like, a thousand times. Even if someone does tip off Kostov, it's not like he's going to show up tonight. And you've got guys on the gate, and God knows how many contingency plans."

Matt still looked far from convinced, and if it were possible, his frown had deepened.

"I'll be fine." Her voice evaporated into the night along with the fog of her breath.

"With all due respect, ma'am—" Matt cast her a sideways glance. "—I'll be glad when I can hand your protection over to the Secret Service."

A smile sprang to her lips. "Come on. I can't be that bad."

Matt shot her a look, one that told her that no matter how bad she thought herself to be, it couldn't come close to his assessment.

"Well, at least I'm not dull."

"My job is to keep you alive, ma'am. Dull is good." Matt strode away from her until he was in line with the agent at the front, whilst the other two agents settled back, so that she was held secure at the centre of their cage with none of them ever more than three long paces away.

That was Matt's job: to worry about every possible outcome so that she didn't have to. And that way, she could focus on her job: putting a stop to Kostov so that when she did finally leave the clinic, she wouldn't have to spend every minute of every hour of every day wondering if DS would be able to keep her family safe.

With Avdonin and his men only six strides away, she stuffed her hands into her coat pockets and her thumb instinctively found the patch of skin left exposed without her wedding ring. She nudged the ghost of the ring around and around, whilst the prickle at the pit of her stomach—as sharp as the pinpricks of drizzle in the air—reminded her that Henry probably wouldn't have been too keen on this plan either.

But that wouldn't have stopped the old Elizabeth, and tonight that's who she needed to be. Old Elizabeth. Who she was before this whole nightmare began.

"Madam Secretary." Minister Avdonin stood with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his black overcoat.

"Minister Avdonin, thank you for agreeing to meet with me." Elizabeth came to a stop a stride away, and her DS agents fell away to the sides.

"So, this is where you've been hiding." He nodded towards the clinic grounds, though his gaze remained locked on her own for a moment. But then it drifted down to her sneakers, and he stared at them as the seconds frittered away like dandelion seeds lost on the breeze. The crease in his brow deepened. When he looked up at her again, his eyes were wide. "They've taken away your laces."

A cringe shivered through Elizabeth, but she fought to keep it from her expression. Instead, it surfaced as a somewhat awkward smile. "They have."

"That bad?"

She shrugged. "House rules."

He continued to stare at her. The whites of his eyes gleamed all that much brighter with the darkness that hung in the air, and with the look that he gave her, it felt as though he were weighing her words against what he knew of her and against the truth.

The flinch of his lips said that she lost.

"We all have our problems." He nodded towards the path behind her. "Shall we?"

Elizabeth and Avdonin strolled side by side along the track. The gravel rasped beneath their soles, whilst above them, the branches of the birch trees lurched with each breath of the breeze—the branches did nothing to fend off the chill, though, merely churn it up before they spewed it towards the ground. Elizabeth's DS agents loosened their cage to five paces away, and Avdonin's men slotted in around them, giving her and Avdonin the air of privacy, though in that blackened hush, every word travelled twice as far.

"So—" Avdonin alternated each of his footsteps with a sideways glance towards Elizabeth. "What's this about?"

"I need your help." Elizabeth turned her face towards him, and she examined his expression as she spoke. "I believe President Dalton reached out to President Salnikov earlier today asking for assistance in capturing a man going by the name of 'Andrei Kostov'." A bitter gust whipped along the tunnel of trees and carried with it a sting of raindrops. Elizabeth hunched her shoulders and tucked her neck into the upturned collar of her coat. "We believe he's a Russian national, part of a group calling themselves 'Protectors of Mother Russia', and that he and the group might be receiving unsanctioned support from the GRU."

The line of Avdonin's jaw hardened. "That's quite a story you've got there, Madam Secretary. But as I'm sure President Salnikov has already told you, Kostov is Bulgarian." He shot her a glare as cold as the breeze. "Nothing to do with Russia."

Elizabeth's hair ruffled against her cheeks as she shook her head. "We both know that just because he's travelling on a Bulgarian passport doesn't mean he's actually Bulgarian. Hell, I've been Canadian, British and at least half a dozen types of European in my career."

"Good for you. That doesn't change the fact that we know of no such group and that nothing the GRU does is unsanctioned. Just because your agencies have problems with loyalty, doesn't mean that everyone else's do too."

Elizabeth stopped, and a couple of paces later, Avdonin halted as well and turned back to face her, whilst the agents surrounding them froze. With her shoulders still raised towards her ears and her eyes watering with the bitter air, she fought to hold his gaze. "Look, what goes on in your country is your business, and how you handle that is up to you—"

"Then stop interfering."

"—but Kostov acted on US soil, using a passport provided by the GRU—"

"So you allege."

"—and if you don't assist us with this investigation, you know the White House'll believe that your government are at the very least complicit, and we will have to retaliate."

His eyes darkened until they held the same soulless depth as the expanse of night that groped through the trees and turned the slender white trunks to ghosts. "You have no proof."

"We have photographic evidence of a GRU officer providing material support to the group Kostov is part of." Elizabeth's voice cut through air. "I'd say that's pretty damning proof."

Avdonin's nostrils flared whilst the clench in his jaw grew tighter still.

So, he didn't know about that, which meant either the Kremlin hadn't deigned to read in their foreign minister on the GRU's actions, or the Kremlin weren't aware either.

Elizabeth's voice softened as she eased half a step closer. "Konstantin, if the GRU are acting outside of President Salnikov's control, you need to say something now, otherwise my government will have no choice but to hold your government responsible for Kostov's actions."

Avdonin's lips pursed with a twist of displeasure whilst he continued to stare at her. It looked as though he were searching every possible route for a way out of the situation, but each path that he traced turned out to be another dead end.

He broke their gaze, and began walking again—an idling pace that crept towards the red brick building that smouldered against the blue-black sky in the distance. "And in this hypothetical situation that you talk of, what if we were to somehow come across some information that led to the capture of this Bulgarian—Kostov?"

"All we're asking for is your cooperation with the investigation." Elizabeth gave a small shrug, her gaze fixed on the gravel ahead as she matched him step for step. "As I said, how you handle your internal affairs is up to you."

For a moment or two, the sound of their footsteps—and those of the agents around them—took over, like sandpaper grating against the air. The fact that Avdonin had agreed to meet with her and the way he had reacted so far strengthened her belief that she was right—that the Kremlin weren't behind the attempt, and that the GRU had gone rogue—but a niggle remained, one that reminded her that if Salnikov _had_ ordered the hit, the best play would be for them to act as though nothing had happened, and in the face of the evidence against them, do all they could to shift blame to the group as perhaps they had originally planned. Just as Avdonin was doing now.

"President Salnikov might be willing to assist in this matter…"

Elizabeth shot him a sideways glance. "Why do I sense a 'but'?"

He met her gaze. "First you need to agree to the new terms of the deal over the BSR."

She halted. "What?"

He turned to face her, and dashed one hand through the air. "Remove all those oppressive environmental clauses your people keep insisting upon."

She reeled back a step, whilst her mind scrambled to catch up. "Firstly, all those clauses were negotiated for and we'd agreed upon them, in theory at least. Secondly, I couldn't sign off on that deal even if I wanted to." She motioned to her sneakers. "No laces, remember. Thirdly, what the hell has this deal got anything to do with Kostov?"

"You want Kostov, we want something in return. You say you can't agree to it now, then we're happy to wait until they give you back your laces."

Elizabeth's eyes widened. _Why didn't he get it?_ "The something in return is that the US won't retaliate for your government supporting a wanted criminal and the organisation that he works for."

"Allegedly."

She pivoted away from him and raked her fingers through her hair until they lodged in the drizzle-dampened roots, whilst her other hand clutched her hip beneath the open fronts of her coat. "You don't have a clue what's going on, do you?"

His expression twisted, as though he were fighting back a snarl. "So, enlighten me, Madam Secretary. Tell me how your government plan to punish my government because someone you claim to be Russian misbehaved on US soil." He gave a jerk of the head that said—_Pfft_. "We both know that whatever you do won't be more than a slap on the wrist."

The drizzle in the air thickened until it hung like a hazy wall between them. Either the Russians were so entrenched in their own denial that they'd actually succeeded in deluding themselves, or neither side saw the other clearly—just as the conspirators would want.

"Just why do you think we're so interested in Kostov?"

Avdonin gave a nonchalant shrug. "He tried to kill a couple of your citizens. Allegedly."

At Avdonin's expression, and the subsequent realisation that crept over Elizabeth, something inside her sank. It felt as though every last assumption she had made were a pebble, and only now that she acknowledged that they were just that—assumptions—did they pour down and gather as a weight in her chest. "I thought… See, this is why they should never block me out of NSC meetings…"

"What are you talking about?" Avdonin looked at her as though he were becoming more and more convinced by the second that she really did belong at the clinic.

"Conrad didn't tell you."

"Tell us what?"

She thrust a hand into the haze that stretched between them, her fingers splayed. "Kostov didn't just try to kill a couple of regular US citizens—though that in itself would be inexcusable…" She shook aside the thought, and then locked her gaze on his. "Konstantin…he poisoned me and my brother."

Avdonin's expression fell. "O Gospodi."

"Yeah." Elizabeth let out a huff, her eyebrows arched. "I'd offer you a drink, but they don't let you have alcohol here either."

"I need to speak with President Salnikov." Avdonin's gaze whistled past her, towards the car parked at the gates, but he made no move. The grim look that descended on his face suggested that he was already playing out just how that conversation might go, and perhaps that was the reason for his hesitation.

"I'd say so." Elizabeth tucked her hands into her pockets. "And when you do, you need to make it clear to him that anything other than total cooperation will be taken as a sign that your government support this group and their actions, and when the US retaliate, it won't just be a slap on the wrist." The fronts of her coat wavered as she shook her head and rounded her shoulders forward in a noncommittal shrug. "How you deal with the GRU is your business; what we care about is capturing Kostov and putting an end to this group's plans as quickly as possible."

"I'll let President Salnikov know." He brushed past her and marched along the path.

"Good." She pivoted after him. "And, Konstantin…"

He stopped and turned to face her with a look that said—_What now?_

"Seeing as how you brought it up… I'd like for you to sign off on the BSR deal, the original terms that we agreed upon before one of your citizens tried to kill me."

Perhaps it was pushing her luck, but she was feeling a little cocky, and given how the night had unfolded, she figured she had the upper hand. Plus, the old Elizabeth wouldn't have hesitated to ask—she would jump at the opportunity to land a deal they'd fought so hard for—and maybe getting him to agree to this was no different to her stepping out through the front doors of the clinic, or eating the pasta, or sitting inside the car. Just another step on the path back to normal.

Avdonin scowled. "President Salnikov will never agree to it."

"By the time you've finished talking with him, it'll sound like a deal he can't refuse."

"It's not good for profit." He laboured each word, as though now she were the one who didn't have a clue.

"There won't be any profit once the ecosystem's been destroyed, not to mention the impact that'll have on the people who live in the region and who are dependent upon it." She stepped towards him, narrowing the gap between them, whilst the drizzle turned into rain and sent slick rivulets coursing down her forehead and along the bridge of her nose. "Can't you see that we have an opportunity here to stand up to the people who would see our two countries move further apart? In attempting to kill me, they've not only tried to subvert US foreign policy, but they're undermining the authority of your government too. Standing with us on this issue sends a message."

"Or you could stand with us, Madam Secretary." The line of his jaw tightened. "Get rid of the clauses and sign the deal how we want it, and no one need know where this meeting took place."

She stopped. Her breath escaped in a huff whilst her lips twisted into a bitter smile. _Blackmail. Nice._ Though not unexpected; she knew that inviting him there was like handing him readymade kompromat. Fortunately, whilst Matt had been obsessing over her safety, it had given her time to come up with a few contingencies of her own.

She gave a slow shake of the head. Her eyes narrowed on him, her gaze sharp. "Kostov poisoned me and my brother. He put us both in a coma, only I woke up and Will didn't, and I spent God knows how long believing I'd lost the boy I've been trying to protect ever since I was fifteen years old, so yes, I ended up here." She flung a gesture towards the clinic behind her, whilst the words drifted up like shadows into the night. "Now, if you really want to use that against me just to get me to change the deal to suit your agenda, then go ahead, but know that it makes you no better than Kostov or the others who conspired to kill me in the first place."

The rain trickled down from her hairline and prickled in her lashes, but she forced herself to hold his gaze and she suppressed the urge to wipe the streaks from her brow. The thread of a feeling tugged at the pit of her stomach whilst the edges of her vision sank inwards, dragging with them the image of the black SUV, its backdoor open with Will convulsing on the backseat.

_Not now. Please, not now._

She drew in a breath as deep as she could given the tightness that bound her chest; the scent of the sodden earth filled her nose and the burn of cold air scorched down into her lungs. The scrolls of bark that peeled from the birch trees ruffled in the breeze, and the rain turned to daggers of ice against her skin. She focused on that, and replayed the mantra—_Will's safe. It's over. You're safe. It's over._—until the images retreated to lurk in the darkness just beyond the tree trunks.

"And if that doesn't convince you, then perhaps we ought to reexamine the facts." With her gaze still fixed on Avdonin, she called out to Matt, who stood four paces away from her, diagonal, front and right. "Matt…where are we right now?"

"We're at an FBI safe house, ma'am," Matt called back, whilst he continued to scour the surroundings as though Kostov might be skulking behind the trees along with the images his actions had left stained in her mind.

"Right. See, that's what I thought." She eased a step closer to Avdonin. "I also think that US and Russian agencies, including the GRU who are _unwaveringly_ loyal to President Salnikov, are working together to bring the people responsible for my attempted murder to justice. But, if you're telling me that I've got part of that story wrong. Well…then the rest might just unravel with it."

"You're threatening to make these allegations about the GRU?"

"They're not just allegations, unless you seriously want to tell me the Kremlin are culpable. Remember, we've already proven the link between the group and the GRU, and if we were to tell the international community what we know, well…a slap on the wrist will be the least of your concerns." She turned her head from side to side, her expression utterly indifferent. "Expulsion of diplomats, freezing of assets, economic sanctions… And that's just for starters."

Avdonin's lips pursed so tight that he couldn't have answered if he wanted to.

She eased another step closer, until no more than a stride separated them. Her lips flinched into half shrug, half smile. "As you said, Konstantin, we all have our problems, and personally, I see no need for us to air them in public."

He continued to stare back at her, his eyes as black and bottomless as the abyss of her dream. A bead of rain crawled down from his forehead and over his temple to tumble from the clenched line of his jaw. "I'll speak to President Salnikov about Kostov, but the BSR's too much."

"I know that President Salnikov's as keen to secure the BSR as we are, otherwise you would've walked away from the talks months ago and you wouldn't have brought it up again tonight. Laces or not, I'm standing by the original deal, the deal that both sides have already negotiated for." She gestured towards him, and the dribbles of rain coursed numb streaks from her fingertips along to her palm. "You say that it's too much, but I'd argue it's just enough to show that we can put this incident behind us and work together like we did with the de-alerting. We make powerful allies, and now's the time to send that message to the people who'd do anything to drive a wedge between us."

He quirked an eyebrow. "One might argue that de-alerting is what got you into this situation."

"I'm sure that's part of it. But what's happened's happened. I'm more interested in how we move forward from here." She held up one hand and her fingertips pressed a star towards his chest. "You'll help us catch Kostov and stop this group, because neither of us can afford for you not to. As for the deal over the BSR?" She shrugged and tossed her hand up as though flinging the star into the night, and then let her hand fall back to her side. "Well, that's just the right thing to do."

He considered her for a moment, his expression as stony as ever. "I'll take your proposal to President Salnikov." And when the hint of a smile tinged Elizabeth's lips, he pointed one finger at her, his gaze hard beneath the ridge of his brow. "But no promises."

Her smile blossomed. Anything less than an outright 'no' was a win as far as she was concerned. "I wouldn't expect anything else."

"Good." He gave her a curt nod. "Madam Secretary."

"Minister Avdonin."

He turned towards the arrow-tipped gates at the end of the track and the black SUV, which was soaked in the yellow glow of the beacons that topped the pillars, and his security detail took their cue to part from her own agents and move to follow him.

But two strides in, he stopped and twisted back to face her. "Your brother? How is he?"

Her shoulders rose, and then fell with her breath. "Doing well, last I heard."

His gaze nudged towards the clinic. "And you?"

A soft smile. "Finding a way forward."

He studied her for a moment, as though he were once again weighing her words against what he knew of her and against the truth. This time, the way that the corner of his lips turned downwards in a kind of shrug told her that she had won. He gave her another nod. "Elizabeth."

"Konstantin."

He turned, and as he walked away, his security closed in around him, two walking ahead, one to the side, whilst the last lingered behind for a moment as he knelt down to tie his laces, his fingers fumbling over the loose knots. The scrunch of their footsteps had softened now as each step slipped into the rain-sodden gravel, and the beads of water that had gathered on their coats swayed down from the woollen hems and splashed to the ground.

The two DS agents at the rear of Elizabeth's detail, Matt and Jimmy, strode towards her. Their steps seemed designed to usher her back along the path towards the clinic, though their gazes kept darting out into the blackness that drifted between the trees. Elizabeth stuffed her hands into her coat pockets as she ambled towards the red brick building that, with its haze of lights simmering out, burned like a bonfire against the backdrop of the night. The first time she had seen the clinic building, it had lit in her a shiver, and perhaps it was just the rain pouring down or the glow inside her from having been right and having pulled off the plan even if it breached all kinds of protocol, but now the building welcomed her almost as warmly as the hearth at home. It was true: there really was nothing quite like the hit of a covert op. But this time the hit came from the feeling that, for a little while at least, she was herself again, and from knowing that what she had said to Sarah the morning after the panic attack—"_I can leave, but I can't go home._"—no longer rang true. One step at a time, she was heading back to being herself. One step at a time, she was heading home.

"And, Elizabeth," Avdonin's voice called out, "once you've found your laces, you can buy me that drink you mentioned."

With a smile lighting her lips, one that spoke of the glow inside, she turned around and paced backwards, her hands still buried in the pockets of her coat. "I would, but I wouldn't want it to look like I was bribing you."

Or at least, that's what she would have said.

Instead her smile dropped and every last muscle froze.

The first thing that hit her was that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring. Then that she should have called Henry when she'd had the chance. Then that she couldn't remember what she'd last said to the kids. Then that she couldn't remember what they'd last said to her, just her own fateful words to her mother to '_Shut the door_'. Then that she should have listened to Russell. Then that she shouldn't have involved her staff. Then that she had made a slip in her calculation. Then that some mistakes couldn't be undone. Then that she shouldn't have dismissed Matt's concerns as going over the top. Then the look on Avdonin's face as the _crack_ rang out. Then the relief that, no matter what, at least he hadn't known. Then how the spray arced with the kickback. Then how the casing tumbled to the ground. Then how the sound ricocheted off the tree trunks and rippled into the night. Then how the crows flew up from beneath the pillars of the gate, and the way that their wings fanned in jagged silhouettes against the yellow light.

Then how much it hurt.

No more than a second could have passed from the moment she had turned to see that the last of Avdonin's men had risen from the pretence of tying his laces and had drawn his Glock to the moment that the first bullet slammed into her chest.

Then another.

Then one more.

And as she looked back over the course of the night, she realised that in some ways she had been wrong and in some ways she had been right, but none of it really mattered, not right now, because what had happened had happened, and as the pain bled through her chest and drained her of her breath, the last thing that hit her was that perhaps it would be best if she were to let herself fall.

* * *

**And that brings us to the end of part four. Thank you for sticking with the story so far.**

**See you tomorrow for the start of part five?**


	62. Chapter Sixty: Gunsmoke

**Chapter Sixty**

**…****Gunsmoke.**

**Henry**

**2:01 AM**

"_Earlier on, when you asked me if I'd thought about it… I'm sorry that I lied._"

Henry's eyes jolted open, and he scrambled to prop himself against his elbows where he lay on his side of the bed. A sliver of pallid amber light crept through the chink in the curtains, a diffuse beam that unspooled amidst the shadows, whilst the chill in the air prickled against his sweat-slicked brow and snuck beneath the neckline of his tee to elicit a shiver that rippled through his shoulders and brought a ragged edge to each gasp of breath.

His hand groped through the covers, his fingers thirsting for a touch that would wash away the remnants of the nightmare: the image of Elizabeth, the warmth of her skin drained to milk white, her lips brushed with a blue the shade of watered-down ink, her pupils like two black windows gaping open as her soul escaped into the night. But the cold sheets that greeted him only reminded him that he had simply awoken to a different kind of nightmare.

She had been gone three weeks. That meant three washes of the bedsheets, yet still her scent clung to the cotton—a cocoon that wrapped around him and soothed him to sleep each night, only to unravel into an empty promise the moment that he awoke. It taunted him that so much of her still surrounded him whilst she herself had gone, and it left him feeling as lost as he had done the day he'd learnt that she'd failed to show up to her transportation out of Iraq and he'd been forced to lie to their daughter—_We made this, Henry_—who waited by the front door. When he'd left her at the clinic, he'd honestly believed that things would be all right—that she'd sleep and talk and heal—just as on Stevie's eighth birthday, he'd believed that at any minute they'd hear her knock echoing at the door. But then the staff told him that Elizabeth wasn't 'engaging', then Dr Sherman said that Elizabeth was planning to leave and that she had serious concerns, then came news of the panic attack, followed by the revelation that Elizabeth would stay after all but they could no longer accept his calls. After three days spent missing in Iraq, she had finally come home, but now, having heard nothing of her for the past twelve days, it made him question whether that narrow window Dr Sherman had spoken of—the one that would see Elizabeth return to how she was before—had already slammed shut. Which in turn only added to the feeling that he should have done something sooner, he should have found a way to make her see sense, even if he didn't know what that way might have looked like, he should have done something more.

The thought haunted him as much as the image of Elizabeth and what might have happened to her had he never called Dr Sherman at all.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, hunched forward, and rubbed the dregs of sleep from his face, as though to leave them there would only invite the image to flood back. The room simmered with its blue-black light, and though he could have chased the shadows away with the glow of the bedside lamp, he didn't. It would be just one more reminder that there was no one there to disturb. Instead, he grabbed the sweatshirt that sprawled across the armchair and wrestled it on as he padded out of the bedroom and into the hall.

Downstairs, the den was steeped in darkness, the kind that hung so thick that it brushed up against Henry as he shuffled towards the couch. He slumped down onto the cushions, snatched up the remote control, and zapped the television to life. The light from the screen flickered across the walls and painted them in flashes of grey and not-quite-white. He scrolled the volume down to one bar and then navigated to another rerun.

"Hey."

At Alison's voice, he startled and twisted around. Alison stepped off the bottom of the stairs, her cardigan bundled around her, her hands bunched and hidden in the sleeves.

"Hey, Noodle." His voice held a quiver of surprise. "What are you doing up?"

"I couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd work on some designs, but then I heard you getting up." She sank down onto the opposite end of the couch, and then drew her knees up until she was tucked into the corner. In the darkness, the glimmer of fear that lit her eyes seemed all the much brighter, like the white cast out by the television screen. "Someone didn't call, did they…? About Mom?"

Henry paused. For a moment, it felt as though she'd been privy to his dream, as though all their concerns and fears about Elizabeth had somehow become communal, threads that drifted through the house and wove through their minds, carrying with them all the same thoughts.

He shook the feeling away, and offered her a taut smile, and was about to tell her that he hadn't heard anything, that he just couldn't sleep either, when—

"What's happened to Mom?" Jason's voice came from the stairwell.

Both Henry and Alison twisted around.

Jason strode down the last step, and as he walked over, his footsteps thumped off the floorboards. With his arms folded loosely across his chest, he leant back against the edge of the kitchen table and met them both with an expectant look, though his eyes held fear too, like deep water currents swarming beneath a seemingly tranquil surface. His shoulders flinched forward. "So?"

Henry took a breath and rubbed his brow, whilst once again that feeling took hold. He opened his mouth, ready to say, _Nothing's happened to Mom_.

But at the dab of footfall coming down the stairs, he paused.

Stevie stopped on the second from bottom step, her hand rested against the newel cap. Her gaze jumped from Jason to Alison and then to Henry, and her eyes widened, until the reflection of the light from the television screen shimmered off their whites. "Did you guys get that feeling too?"

"What feeling?" Henry said.

Stevie gave a stilted shrug, but the way her fingers flexed against the newel cap belied that nonchalance. "I don't know… I just had this bad feeling, like something was wrong."

Jason's and Alison's gazes drifted back to Henry, and without a word, they said that they felt that way too.

That communal thread now wrapped around the pit of Henry's stomach, but he met them with what he hoped would be a reassuring smile. "Nothing's happened to Mom."

Their expressions said that his attempt at reassurance had failed.

He tried again. "Look, I just couldn't sleep, that's all."

Jason jutted his chin. "Because you're worried about her too?"

Henry massaged the creases that had sunk into his brow, his other arm resting along the grey blanket that was draped over the back of the couch, the wool rough to the touch. "There's no need to worry about Mom. It's the middle of the night." He gestured to the darkness around them. "She'll be fast asleep—as should the rest of you."

"You're not."

Henry shot Jason a look. "I don't have school, college and…" His frown deepened as he fumbled for the right term. "…_White House-ing_ in the morning." He beckoned Stevie and Jason over. "Look, come here. Sit down."

He shifted to sit at the edge of the footstool. Jason trudged over and slouched down onto the cushions, whilst Stevie perched against the arm of the couch. Henry stooped forward, his arms rested to his thighs, his hands clasped loosely in front of him. His gaze swept to each of them in turn. "Mom's safe, okay? The staff at the clinic know what they're doing, and she's got her DS guys protecting her. They're not going to let anything happen to her."

Alison banded her arms around her legs even tighter. "Then how come we've got Secret Service guys following us all of a sudden?"

Henry gave a slight shake of the head. "DS said that's just a precaution. If Mom knows that we're safe, she'll be able to focus on getting better."

"Having DS around her didn't help before." Jason scowled, and his lips drew into the start of a pout. "How many agents stood by while someone poisoned her and Uncle Will?"

Henry paused. _God this was so much easier when they were too young to understand or to ask any questions._

Jason's pout grew tighter; it demanded—or perhaps dared—Henry to answer.

"Before, they weren't aware of a threat," Henry said, "now, they're more prepared."

Alison's eyebrows arched, a look of dismay. "So there's still a threat?"

Henry pinched the bridge of his nose. _Definitely easier before_. His hand fell back to his lap. "Until they catch who did this, there's still a chance that they might do something again." He held up one hand and signalled for Alison to pause that thought as her eyes widened. "But everyone's doing everything they can to find them, and that chance is only small."

Jason folded his arms across his chest and sank back against the cushions. "And now we're back to the party line." He huffed, and then cut a sideways glance towards Stevie. "You work at the White House, don't they tell you what's going on?"

Stevie's expression took on a hint of alarm, but she brushed it away within less than a second. She turned her head from side to side, her lips downturned in a shrug. "Russell doesn't tell me anything, he said the same as DS, that the Secret Service guys are just a precaution."

Alison worried the cuffs of her cardigan, still staring at Henry, her look almost pleading. "Can't you call her and check that she's okay?"

Henry held her eye. "They would have let us know if anything was wrong."

All three gazes bored into him. They weren't backing down.

His tone sharpened. "I'm not calling the clinic in the middle of the night for no good reason."

"How about the fact all four of us have a bad feeling?" Jason said.

"I thought you believed in science."

Jason shrugged. "I'm open to a little prescience too."

Henry let that statement linger for a moment, not quite sure whether to believe Jason or whether Jason was just being contrary. Then he broke his gaze away from Jason's and focused on the girls instead. "Look, I know that upping our security has raised a few concerns, and that's only natural—"

Jason rolled his eyes.

"—but Mom's okay, and I can't go calling up the clinic in the middle of the night over some _feeling_ that we have."

Jason quirked an eyebrow. "So, you admit that you feel it too?"

Henry held Jason's gaze for a moment—It was no good denying it.—and then he gave a slow shake of the head. "My worrying over your mother is nothing new." He motioned as though herding them towards the stairs. "Now, let's all just go back to bed and I'm sure this _feeling_ will have passed by the morning." Though, he had a feeling that going back to his bedroom and being surrounded in Elizabeth's presence, and absence, would only make his own feelings worse.

The kids didn't move. Instead, they just looked at him. A simultaneous—_You've got to be kidding_.

"Or we can all stay down here and watch Gunsmoke."

Jason's incredulous look deepened. "Watching people get shot? Because that's real calming."

"Your choice."

Jason scowled back at him, but still didn't move.

"Great. Gunsmoke it is." Henry stood up and squeezed next to Jason on the couch. Then he motioned for Stevie to slide down from the armrest and join the rest of them.

He turned up the volume so that the low hum of voices filled the room whilst the light cast off from the screen continued to dance across the walls. With Stevie leant against him, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and then when Jason softened towards him, he slung an arm over his shoulders too, whilst Alison curled up at the far end, her cardigan huddled around her, her chin propped against her palm. It wasn't long before their heads began to nod, only for their eyes to snap open a moment later, just as they had done when they were little and were determined to outlast their tiredness and resist going to bed a single second before they had to. His own tiredness didn't come. Instead, it foundered beneath his inner debate over whether to call the clinic or not and the voice that reminded him that even if he did call, they'd only say they could no longer share that information with him, all whilst maintaining that infuriatingly neutral tone.

When the jaunty lilt of the closing credits piped through the den and the kids didn't so much as stir, the decision was taken out of his hands. To move then would only disturb them, and even if something had happened, he wouldn't deny them of a moment's rest. Nor would he tell them that whilst their bad feeling spoke of Secret Service agents and assassination attempts, his spoke of three weeks' of silence and what would happen to Elizabeth—to all of them—if she returned no better than she had been when she'd left. That was a very different kind of threat.

Just like when she had disappeared in Iraq and he had to choose to believe that she was coming back, he knew that he had to choose to believe the same thing now: to believe that her silence came from genuine concern for him and the kids, and that her request for him to turn his attention to them meant that she had turned her attention to herself. Because he needed her to come back. Not the shell she'd become, but the old Elizabeth—the one whose smile he'd drive halfway across the world to catch just a glimmer of, the one who'd snuggle with them on the couch and tease him for missing her so much, the one who'd be there when he awoke and could cause a nightmare to evaporate with a single touch.

Better that than to believe that her spirit might wisp into the night like a strand of gunsmoke.

* * *

**Conrad**

**2:59 AM**

"What's happening?"

The door to the Situation Room swung shut behind Conrad, and he gestured for all those gathered to retake their seats before they were even halfway to standing. NSA Hill, DNI Ware, Director Haymond, Acting Secretary Cushing, General Reeves and Secretary Becker had already arrived, along with Russell of course, and the fact that they all wore casual—and slightly crumpled—clothing nodded to both the lateness of the hour and the possible urgency of the situation.

"Russia, of course." Russell pivoted back and forth in his seat near the head of the table.

"Anything a little more specific?" Conrad dragged out his own chair and sank down. His gaze swept to the rest of the NSC seated around the desk; it broke off only briefly for him to give Russell a nod of thanks as Russell pushed a takeaway coffee cup towards him.

"We were alerted to unusual activity in and around Moscow by our agents in country." Ephraim Ware steepled his hands together atop the desk and he twisted to face Conrad. The dim light of the room reflected pale blue off the lenses of his glasses. "It started a couple of hours ago with the top brass being summoned to the Kremlin."

"But they've gathered far more personnel since," Director Haymond added. With his arms rested against the tabletop, he gave a shrug. "It's the hottest ticket in town."

"Do we think they're planning something?" Conrad asked.

"I've reached out to our embassy in Moscow." Acting Secretary Cushing leant forward in his seat halfway along the table, so that he could be seen past the others. "But they aren't aware of anything, and they're not aware of the Russians expelling any diplomats from the other embassies."

"What's more telling is that they've scrambled their jets out of Kursk," Ellen Hill said.

Conrad frowned. Kursk meant— "Interceptors."

Ellen nodded. "Yes, sir."

"So, they're expecting an attack." It was both a statement and a question.

"From what we gather, they're currently guarding Russian airspace."

"But who from?"

Gordon Becker gave a slight shake of the head, and his hands gestured where they rested above the desk as he spoke. "Given that they're focusing on their eastern border, I'd have to say our best guess, sir, is that they're worried about an attack coming from the US."

Conrad's frown deepened. He rocked back in his seat, and with his elbow pitting into the leather arm of the chair, he rested his face in the cradle between forefinger and thumb. "But why?"

Gordon pressed his lips into a firm line and shook his head again. "We don't know, sir."

"They can't know about the sanctions we discussed earlier—" Russell hunched over the desk, and his hands formed a loose circle around his coffee cup. "—and even if they did, that wouldn't warrant this kind of response."

"I'm guessing President Salnikov's remaining steadfast in his silence," Conrad said.

Russell gave a small nod.

"What about Minister Avdonin?"

"Headed back to Moscow not long after the reports started to come in."

"And their embassy?"

"Just as busy as the Kremlin, and refusing to pick up the phone."

Conrad's jaw tightened, whilst his gaze softened to a stare that sailed far beyond the length of the desk. "So, what do they know, or think that they know?"

A pause drifted across the room, as vague as the aroma of coffee that filtered through the air, and it felt as though all those gathered were drawing straws as to who would answer that question, or perhaps they were engaged in a silent debate as to whether it were a question at all.

"We don't know, sir." Russell broke the lull. "But with Salnikov being as volatile as he is, I wouldn't be surprised if he replaced those interceptors with bombers." He tossed one hand up. "First this thing with Elizabeth, now this descent into paranoia, it doesn't exactly scream 'stable'."

Conrad swept his gaze along the desk, towards Haymond and Ware. "Is there any chance he knows that we've established a definitive connection between the GRU and the group?"

At Haymond's nod to Ware, Ware spoke for the both of them. "Our agents have no reason to believe that they've been made, and we're not aware of any leaks."

Ellen Hill looked around the others as she spoke. "But even if they were aware, why act as though an attack is imminent? They must know that our first response would be targeted sanctions."

Gordon gave a small shrug. "It could always be a preemptive defensive posture." He cast a glance around the room as though looking for support for that suggestion. "Maybe they are planning something else, something that would lead to more than just sanctions."

Haymond shook his head. "It all seems too reactive for that. And if it were the case, then by preparing like this, all it's done is alerted us to the fact that something might happen."

Another silence settled across the room. Either they'd run out of suggestions, or they could see half a dozen ways the others would shoot them down and so dared not vocalise them. What they needed was more information, or a little out-of-the-box thinking to fill in the gaps. This was about the point when Elizabeth would step in with some nugget gleamed from God only knows where or an idea that was no more than an unpolished gem at best. Though somehow she made it shine.

But of course, if Elizabeth were there, then they probably wouldn't be having this debate in the first place. What the Russians had done deserved far more than the expulsion of diplomats and the implementation of targeted sanctions. Not just the poisoning itself, but all that had come after as well, as though that initial action were just the stone dropped into the water, and everything else had rippled out from that—some waves dying away, whilst others added to those generated by stones dropped years ago and summated to produce something far greater.

Conrad let out a huff of a sigh and tapped his fingers against the armrest. "Why do I feel like we're trying to solve a Rubik's cube with half the squares missing?"

Russell took a sip of coffee, his mutter half hidden by the plastic lid. "I'd say you've got a better chance of doing that than understanding Salnikov."

Conrad shot him a look—one that said defeatism was not becoming.

Russell just shrugged in reply.

The door swooshed open behind them, and the yellow light from the hallway flooded in and diffused into the room. Director Doherty strode inside. He too had adopted the casual and crumpled look that spoke of being summoned back to work in the middle of the night, though what the FBI had to do with the Russia situation, Conrad didn't know.

"Mister President, I'm sorry to interrupt." Doherty halted near the head of the table. He faced Conrad, his back to the rest of the room. The fluorescent strips that hung above illuminated a slight sheen to his brow, along with a glimmer—_Was that fear?_—that brightened his eyes.

Russell stooped forward, placed his coffee cup down on the desk, and then picked at the edge of the corrugated cardboard sleeve. He shot Doherty a glance. "Any chance you can tell us why Russia's adopting a defensive crouch?"

Doherty's mouth hung open for an endless second, just enough to make the whole room stop.

Fingers of dread gripped Conrad's stomach, whilst out of the corner of his eye, even Russell stilled. Through the clench in his jaw, Conrad asked, "What's happened?"

"There's been a shooting," Doherty said.

"How bad?"

Doherty shook his head. "The situation's unclear."

"That wasn't the question." Russell cut in.

"I'm still waiting for a full report."

"You didn't just interrupt an NSC meeting to tell us what you don't know."

Doherty's gaze drifted away from Russell and back to Conrad. He swallowed. "Two casualties, both shot multiple times. One's the shooter, a Russian national…"

"And the other?" Russell asked the question before Conrad could tell him not to.

Somewhere out there a stone had dashed into a body of water, and only now did the ripples it cast off spread as far as that room. As they hit him, everything inside him sank, a single pang before he succumbed to wave upon wave of numb. He pushed himself up from his seat and retreated to the door, but then stopped as his breath fled him. He pressed his palms to the cool wood.

"Sir?" Russell's voice came from a distance.

Conrad bowed his head. Closed his eyes. A moment—he could allow himself that. Then he straightened up as much as he could, and he faced the room. He gave the answer held in Doherty's expression, the one that had been staring at him from some recess of his mind. Out-of-the-box thinking? Someone who'd fill in the gaps and make an unpolished gem shine? "Elizabeth McCord. They shot Elizabeth McCord."

* * *

**Thank you for reading. **

**And thank you for taking the time to review. 'Tis very much appreciated. ****: )**


	63. Chapter Sixty-One: the flip of a coin

**Note**: Sorry about yesterday. My appointment took most of the day and I crashed out when I finally got home. I had intended to prep a few chapters the day before so I'd just have to hit 'post' when I got back, but my heating system broke down the day before that and I find it hard to concentrate when someone is mansplaining diverter valves to me and it's freezing cold. Anyhoo, back to the story...

* * *

**Chapter Sixty-One**

**…****the flip of a coin.**

**Elizabeth**

_I should have died in a car crash, I should have been captured and shot more times than I can count, I should have been hanged for espionage, I should have been stoned to death in the streets, I should have been blown to pieces in a car bomb…_

**2002 — Iraq**

Elizabeth grabbed the last of her clothes from the locker and slammed the door shut. The clang of metal on metal filled the already cramped room. She stuffed the clothes into the rucksack that balanced atop the cot bed wedged between the three walls at the far end of the CHU. Just one glance at the rough woollen blanket that draped over the bed was enough to make an itch crawl over her skin. One more reason why she couldn't wait to be back home. Nice soft sheets, Henry there to hold her (if he wasn't still in a bad mood), a coolness to the air that made each breath feel fuller, her babies sleeping down the hall. No sand.

_Drmmm. Drmmm. Drmmm_. A fist pounded on the door.

"Hey… Mickey?"

"Just a sec." She zipped up the rucksack, clicked the plastic clips together and then slung the straps over her shoulders. She hoisted the bag up and wriggled it into a position that would just about pass for comfortable. A foldable camping chair stuck out from beneath the desk; she sidestepped around it, dodged the locker on the opposite side, and then gave one last sweep of the room before she hauled open the door.

The haze of sunlight rushed in, as grating as the sand that hung in the air.

She raised one hand to shield her eyes and was met with Mitch's easy-going smile.

Mitch stood three strides away, with his hands rested against his hips, his own rucksack pitted in the layer of moon dust that coated the ground. Smile still alight, he nodded towards the CHU. "I thought you might have taken to your new home. Decided to stay a while."

She tugged the door shut. "A bed that creaks every time I move, walls so thin that I can hear far too much creaking coming from the adjacent rooms—not to mention the other sounds—air vents that literally suck sand into the room, and my very own electric fan to blow that sand around. What more could a girl want?"

A couple of the soldiers sauntered past. Their gazes roamed over her body, and one of them let out a low whistle. "How 'bout some company to keep you warm on those cold desert nights?"

Elizabeth gestured towards them whilst she kept her gaze firmly on Mitch. "Oh, and a friendly neighbourhood lech or two."

Mitch twisted around to face the soldiers. "Way above your clearance level, private."

The soldiers muttered something to one another, cast Mitch a dirty look, and then the one who had whistled jutted his chin towards them and tossed out the word—"Spooks."—before they strode on, their boots lifting up clouds of the talc-fine sand that then lingered in their wake.

When Mitch turned back to face her, his smile now having waned slightly and holding a bitter tinge, Elizabeth tilted her head towards the fence with its coils of barbed wire that marked the perimeter of the compound. "Shall we?"

Mitch grabbed up his rucksack and slung it over one shoulder, and they began their trek towards the gate in the distance and the sand beige Humvee that was parked in the lot beyond, ready to take them to their transport out of country.

Elizabeth cast Mitch a sideways glance. His expression had dimmed even further, perhaps due to the thought of the journey ahead and leaving the safety of the compound; even Mr Laid-Back had his limits. She nudged his elbow, a smile playing on her lips. "Hey. At least the jerks at Langley offer to buy a girl a cup of coffee before outright propositioning her."

He grinned. "You're never gonna let me forget it, are you?"

"What was it again?" She pretended to think for a moment. "'How could I notice the diamond on your finger when I was lost in the sapphires of your eyes?'"

The muscles of his neck tightened as he cringed, and the hint of a blush crept into his cheeks. "God… It's even worse on the rewind."

"Well, at least it made me laugh. And I guess the coffee coming out my nose put a stopper on that thought."

He twisted to face her as they walked. A twinkle lit his eyes. "You're kidding. Coffee snort?" He shook his head. "That's what sealed you as 'Top Secret'; way above my clearance level too."

Elizabeth gave a throaty laugh, and as Mitch's gaze lingered on her, his smile now warm once more, she turned back to the sand track ahead, and they continued their steady pace towards the perimeter, each footstep releasing a billow of moon dust.

Another string of soldiers strode past; once again, they undressed her and ravished every last inch of what they found beneath with their looks. She tried her best to ignore them, despite the shudder that jarred through the back of her neck, and with her hands wrapped around the bottom of the straps, she hitched her rucksack up and shot Mitch a glance. "I'm sure Jenny'll be pleased to have you back."

Mitch sucked in a breath. "I don't know. She threatened to divorce me when I got the call."

"Well, the last few days are bad enough as it is without your husband disappearing to the Sandbox. Just wait until labour kicks in." Her gaze turned distant as she stared out across the compound's wasteland of sand. "I think I must've threatened to kill Henry at least twenty times before Stevie arrived…might have crushed a couple of bones in his hand too."

"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I didn't make it back for the birth after all."

"You know you wouldn't miss it for the world."

"I guess I'll just have to interrogate you for all intel on the flight home."

"You really think you can make me crack?" She eyed him, her expression deadpan. But then she smiled and bumped her arm against his. "Don't worry, I'll have you fully read in on parenthood by the time we land. I guess I owe you as much for fourteen-odd hours of ranting about Will."

"Then I probably shouldn't tell you that I slept through at least seven hours of that, and for the other seven I had my earphones in."

She stopped and stared at him. Utterly incredulous. At his grin, she shoved him, just hard enough to make him stumble and stir up a cloud of the talc-thin sand that then wafted into the air and dried each breath. She shook her head to herself. God, at times he could be just as infuriating as Will. "Here I am, trying to be nice to you. I was even going to offer to babysit, but now…"

He gave a snort of a laugh. "Come off it, Mickey. We both know what you're like with newborns. You can't resist."

She smiled, though more to herself as the thought of her own babies flooded back to mind. It felt impossible that eight years ago to the day, she was about to become a mother; the years had passed in a matter of seconds, yet somehow felt like a lifetime away. "Just wait until you hold him for the first time. Then you'll get it." She turned to Mitch with a knowing look. "Trust me."

He winked at her. That twinkle again. "I always do."

Though she tried to fight it off, a laugh burst through. "God, can you get any more cheesy?"

"Tell you what. I'll trade you. Cheesy lines that I've used—with varying degrees of success—in return for parenting tips. The hours will fly by. Trust me."

Her cheeks ached from holding back her smirk. "Deal."

A group of soldiers flurried around the Humvee in the parking lot outside, some climbing aboard whilst others passed up rucksacks and rifles. When Elizabeth and Mitch neared the guard post at the edge of the compound, the sergeant who was shouting orders at the men gave the pair a double take and then stopped and strode towards them.

At his sombre expression, Elizabeth's stomach tightened. "Well, this doesn't look good."

"Change of plans," the sergeant called out to them as he approached. "Increased activity in the area means we're not going to risk a convoy, and there's only room for one of you. We'll try to secure transport out for the other tomorrow, maybe the day after."

"Hey, wait. That wasn't the deal." Elizabeth held up one hand, as though she could push back that thought. "Langley promised to get us both back as soon as we were done." Her heart sank and it brought a ragged edge to the words. "It's my daughter's birthday tomorrow."

"And my wife's nine months pregnant," Mitch added. "She could go into labour at any moment."

The sergeant shrugged. "Not my problem. Your transport leaves in half an hour, so flip a coin or argue it out, do whatever you need to do, but if one of you isn't on that Humvee in the next two minutes, we're leaving without the both of you."

The sergeant walked backwards for several paces, his hands held out wide in a frozen shrug, and then he turned around with a skip and jogged towards the Humvee. The track of moon dust tossed up by his boots lifted to shoulder height and hung in the air, a cloud of sand. They probably had less time than it would take for that cloud to fall in which to make their decision.

Tension radiated along Elizabeth's jawline. _God, how she hated sand_.

Mitch turned to Elizabeth. The knuckles of the hand wrapped around the strap of his rucksack had blanched. "So, how do you want to do this?" He left just a fraction of a pause before his chin dipped and he shook his head, perhaps to avoid meeting her gaze. "I know what I said, but if I don't make it back and the baby does come…" He raked his fingers through his hair and clutched the back of his neck. His expression turned pained. "…Jenny'll go mental."

_Jenny'll go mental? But what about Henry…?_ Elizabeth massaged her brow. How many times had Henry pointed out that it was Stevie's birthday? And how many times did she promise them both that she'd make it back? If she missed it now, it would only give him more ammunition to throw at her about putting her job before their family. And God knew she didn't need him mad at her, or worse—looking at her with that disappointed expression and a silent simmering of resentment—especially not when Will wasn't talking to her and was threatening to go work in a war zone. And regardless of how Henry would react, she'd had enough of the compound, of the men, of the lifeless air, of the sand—the _freaking_ sand. And she didn't want to let Stevie down.

But a birthday, as much as it meant for her to be there, wasn't the same as a birth, and though her heart sank to say it, there was only one option.

Her lips quirked to the side, not even half a smile. "You should go."

A flash of shock lit Mitch's expression, and he drew back. "Really?" A pause. Then his brow furrowed. "Because I was prepared to fight you for it."

Her smile blossomed. "Come on, we both know who'd win that."

"True." He smiled back. But then his expression turned serious, and his gaze darted towards the compound before it returned to hers. "Are you sure you're going to be all right here on your own?"

Though unease trickled out like cold treacle from the pit of her stomach at the thought of some of the soldiers, the ones who had no qualms about letting her know just what they'd like to do to her and who couldn't comprehend—or perhaps just didn't care—that she might say 'no', she gave a firm nod. "I can handle myself."

"I know you can. It's the grunts that I'm worried for." And there was that grin again.

She shoved his chest. "You can't be sincere for two seconds, can you?"

She waited for his quip, for a playful taunt. But it didn't come.

Instead, as the seconds unspooled into silence, his expression melted into sober. He studied her eyes with a slight flitter to his gaze; it looked as though he had lost himself amidst a sea of sapphires and was searching for an answer obscured beneath their depths. All the while, his smile faded until it held nothing more than a tinge of sorrow. "No." His throat bobbed. "Not with you."

Elizabeth's chest tightened. It squeezed the word out. "What?"

_He couldn't mean… He didn't mean… Surely…_

But the look in his eyes said that he did.

The urge to yell at him, to curse him out, to shove him back bubbled up inside her. Three words. That's all it took. Three words to see six years of friendship sink into the quicksand.

She swallowed back the thickness in her throat, and as she shook her head to herself, the wisps of hair that had escaped her ponytail and framed her face tickled against her skin. She forced herself to meet his gaze. "You know, on second thought, I think I prefer insincere you."

He stepped towards her and reached out as though to take hold of her hand. "Elizabeth—"

But she stopped him with a single look.

Silence flowed through the air as thick as the sand.

"Thirty seconds," the sergeant shouted. "Are you coming or not?"

When Mitch didn't move, just continued to stare at her with that solemn expression, full of hurt and want, she jerked her head towards the Humvee. "You should go."

He shook his head, and a deep frown settled across his brow. "No." Then his hand retreated and he drew back, placing more distance between them than the half-step he took. "I shouldn't have said that. Let me make it up to you." He motioned to the waiting vehicle. "You go. Be there for Stevie. Jenny's already mad at me; there's no point in making Henry mad at you."

"Fifteen seconds," the sergeant shouted as the last of the soldiers climbed up.

The vehicle called to her. It felt as though there were a thread wrapped around her middle tugging her in, its pull even stronger than moments before. In just over half a day, she could be at home, with her family, with Henry. That's what she wanted. She thought Mitch understood that too.

"Ten seconds."

She turned back to Mitch and gave him a firm look. "I'm Elizabeth to Henry, but I'm never—_never_—going to be more than Mickey to you. Understood?"

"Slip of the tongue." He gestured around them. "I blame all the sand."

"Good," she said, though more of her wanted it than believed it to be true. She gave him a light shove towards the gate and the vehicle beyond. "Now, go home, before I change my mind."

He quirked an eyebrow. "You sure?"

"Five seconds," the sergeant shouted.

"Do you want to see your son being born or not?"

"Yes."

Her eyes widened, and she ushered him towards the Humvee. "Then go."

"Thank you." He grinned, but he lingered for a moment longer, just long enough to make her fear that he might say something more, something she couldn't pretend to forget—the three words that hid behind those three words.

But then he strode away. And she found herself caught between the tide of relief and the undertow of loss. _Why couldn't he have just done that before?_

When he neared the vehicle, he turned back to face her and took the last few steps with a backward stride. "Oh and, Mickey—" He gestured to the compound behind her. "—play nice."

She flashed him the finger, and then matched his smile and turned the gesture to a hand held aloft in a motionless wave. It was the right decision. Henry and Stevie would understand. Eventually. And hopefully being with his wife for the birth of their son would make Mitch realise that her being Mickey was enough for him. Because there were days when Elizabeth fell short of the moral standard, when Lizzie was the architect of an oppressive regime, when Mommy was mean, and when Bess meant no more than any other employee. And on those days, she needed to be Mickey.

Mitch climbed up, and hanging from the door, he called out to her, his lips fixed in that easy-going smile that was synonymous with him. "I'll see you back at Lang—"

A wall of fire shot up from the ground. Above it, sand, dirt and dust swelled. The cloud plumed outwards, forming jagged peaks. Then a burst of white snuck through. In a flash, it obliterated everything else. A white dome. Perfect. Complete. A ball of talcum smoke cut clean in two. It ballooned until it replaced the sky. A whitewash over cloudless blue. And in a flash, it diffused. Its veil thinned and the billows of black swarmed through.

Then came the—BOOM.

The blast threw Elizabeth backwards and knocked the air from her lungs as it flung her against the ground. Her ears rang, a high-pitched whine, whilst the acrid stench of smoke and charred flesh seared through her nose and throat. She gasped for breath, scrabbled for anything to cling to. But everything was sand. Sand hazed across her vision and stung at her eyes. Sand filled each breath and coated her tongue. Sand whipped at her skin and burned in her wounds.

_God, how she hated sand._

* * *

**Tuesday, 4th December, 2018**

**12:59 AM**

"All units. Shots fired. Bluebird down."

The voice shouted through the black and crackled through the radios in a wave that rippled around Elizabeth where she lay.

"Repeat. Shots fired. Bluebird down."

The crack of bullet after bullet ricocheted through the night. With each one, Elizabeth flinched and her fingers clawed into the waterlogged gravel. She gasped for breath, but the oxygen had evaporated from the air and her chest felt like it had been wrenched through a mangle.

Another shot. The back of her neck tensed and she pressed her forehead to the ground.

Silence.

"Shooter neutralised. Repeat. Shooter neutralised."

The rain pounded through the trees in a rush and a roar. The trenches of water that coursed through the gravel froze Elizabeth's fingertips until they tingled and then faded to numb. The wind whipped the branches of the birches and stirred them into a knocking rattle as they gyred back and forth. The smell of damp and smoke hung at the periphery of Elizabeth's senses. If only she could breathe that air in. _Breathe. Just breathe_. But the weight on her chest pressed down.

"Ma'am?" Matt's voice. "Ma'am?"

"What's the status of Bluebird?" Then again, sharper. "What's the status of Bluebird?"

Every moment in life is the flip of a coin. Heads you live. Tails you die.

That's not to say that it's fifty-fifty though.

Each side is weighted by all the decisions that have come before.

The ones you made.

And the ones made by others too.

* * *

**Monday, 3rd December, 2018**

**8:03 PM**

The other clients filed out from the dining room, along the curve of the reception desk and down the dimly lit corridor towards the largest of the therapy rooms. A hum of chatter flowed with them, bridging the gap between dinnertime conversations and the group meeting about to start.

Once in reception, Elizabeth broke away from the group and darted across the waiting area to where Matt stood by the inner set of glass doors. With her arms folded across her chest, tucking the fronts of her cardigan around her, she cast a glance over her shoulder. The others continued to talk and laugh as they meandered along the hall, and no one so much as looked towards her as they disappeared into the shadows and their voices faded to lingering echoes.

She turned to Matt. "So?"

Matt let out a huff of a sigh, and tutted to himself. "Blake called."

"And…?"

His gaze swivelled away as though it pained him to say it, or perhaps just to avoid the persistence of her own. "And Minister Avdonin agreed to the meeting."

A spark lit in her chest. "So, the plan's a go?"

"Ma'am…I really think you ought to let the White House handle this."

"They don't have the rapport with Avdonin that I do."

Matt gave her a stern look. "They also don't have a target on their back and an assassin on the loose."

She flapped the comment aside. "Kostov won't show up tonight."

"With all due respect, ma'am, you don't know that."

"And you don't know that he will."

"This location's hardly secure." He gestured around them.

"Look—" She held up one hand, her fingers starred towards his chest. "—Avdonin's already agreed to the meeting, and if I stand him up now, it'll only make things worse."

"Elizabeth." A voice called from down the hall.

She lowered her voice to a whisper and backed towards the reception desk; the heels of her sneakers gaped away from her soles and slapped against the linoleum. "So just do whatever you need to do, but we've got to make this work."

"Ma'am…" Matt called after her and stretched away from his post, trying to keep his sight on her as she stepped back into the shadows of the corridor.

But she turned around and strode down the hall, towards where Amy loitered at the end. She flashed Amy a quick smile. "Sorry. Just had to sort out my shoes." Then she motioned to the open doorway that led into the therapy room. "After you."

* * *

**11:07 PM**

Elizabeth's eyes widened, and she splayed the fingers of one hand towards the bed beside her. "You're kidding me, right?"

She looked back and forth between Matt and the agent he had drafted in, who both stood with their backs to the door whilst a shimmer of fluorescent light crept through the window set into the wood behind them. But no matter how many times she looked from one to the other, they just stared back at her, their expressions as solemn and as unwavering as the shadows that filled the room.

_So, they really weren't kidding._

"I mean, the laces I get, but this… I'm having a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, not being dropped in the middle of ISIS territory waving an American flag, for Pete's sake."

Matt arched his eyebrows just a touch. "It's a reasonable precaution, ma'am."

"It's _way_ over the top."

The female agent cast Matt a wary look, and then returned to Elizabeth. Her lips tugged into a taut line. "Ma'am…we're just trying to keep you safe."

"It makes me look paranoid, and we're trying to lose the 'crazy', remember?" Elizabeth motioned to the clinic around them. "How do you think it looks if I turn up wearing this?"

The agents shared another look, like parents tutting over a toddler throwing a tantrum.

"I'm not wearing it."

Matt gave a slow shake of the head whilst he maintained that same disapproving look. "That's your decision, ma'am, but I'm not prepared to let the meeting go ahead if you don't."

* * *

**Tuesday, 4th December, 2018**

**1:01 AM**

"What's the status of Bluebird?" Then again, sharper. "What's the status of Bluebird?"

Elizabeth pushed herself onto her hands and knees. The gravel dug into her palms whilst the rainwater soaked through her jeans and the denim stuck to her skin, clammy and cold. She gasped for just a puff of breath, but still the air wouldn't come. It hung in the space in front of her nose and mouth; it taunted her as her body screamed for oxygen. The pain seared through her chest, her arms gave out, and with a strangled cry she collapsed to the ground.

"Ma'am." Matt's voice, followed by the grinding of gravel as he knelt down beside her.

The pressure of his hand against her shoulder surged through her chest like jagged sparks, and if she'd had the strength, she would have lashed out. Anything to make the pain stop.

"Ma'am, I need you to stay still."

Matt rolled her onto her back, and she cried out again. With her eyes squeezed shut, the rain coursed over her eyelids, trickled down her temples and ran rivulets over her scalp. Her chest clamped around her lungs whilst Matt wrestled her coat off her shoulders. Every jostle another jolt.

"Three shots to the chest," he called out. Then his voice softened a fraction; it lost none of its urgency, though. "Ma'am, I need you to sit up. Try and take some shallow breaths."

_I can't_, she wanted to shout. _I can't, I can't._

A pair of hands beneath her shoulders hauled her up and then propped her there, so that she was reclined, her legs stretched out in front of her. Someone tugged her coat down, freed her from its sleeves, and then lifted her arms up. Her sweater went next; the rough edge of its neck scraped over her face before the chill of the air and ice rain hit her bare arms. Part of her told her this wasn't dignified, but most of her was too subsumed in the pain and the need for oxygen to care.

The rip of velcro grated though the night. The pressure that bound her chest eased a touch.

"Shallow breaths, ma'am."

The straps of the vest brushed against her ears as someone lifted it up and over her head.

"Did they penetrate?" another agent called out.

Elizabeth sipped at the air, like one of those drinking bird toys her father had bought her as a child. No more than a wisp passed her lips each time.

"Did they penetrate?"

The shards of rain drenched her tee. The sodden cotton clung to her skin and robbed her body of its warmth. She continued to sip, sip, sip, as though trying to quench an all-consuming thirst drop by drop. And with each thread of a breath, her chest begged her to stop.

"Did they penetrate?"

The voice sounded more distant now, and she didn't know if the agent had stepped away or if she was about to pass out and never wake up. For a moment she wished it were the latter. Anything to make the pain stop.

"No," Matt shouted back. "They were stopped." He lowered his voice as he spoke to Elizabeth. An exhausted relief tinged his tone. "Shallow breaths, ma'am. You're going to be okay."

Every moment in life is the flip of a coin. Heads you live. Tails you die.

That's not to say that it's fifty-fifty though.

Each side is weighted by all the decisions that have come before.

The ones you made.

And the ones made by others too.

Elizabeth blinked open her eyes and turned her head to the side until she found Matt's concerned frown. He crouched beside her still, one hand rested against her shoulder whilst the other steadied him against the waterlogged ground. Her fingers crept over the gravel until they covered his own, and though they were still numb from the cold and so many missed breaths, she found just enough strength to squeeze his hand.

Her decision had bought her three bullets to the chest.

But his decision had stopped them with a bulletproof vest.

Between her sips of air, she mouthed, _Thank you._

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	64. Chapter Sixty-Two: made of glass

**Note**: Thank you for all your reviews! I love reading what you guys pick up on, especially the smaller things that I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about, or the things that I intended but didn't state explicitly in the text.

I've pretty much mastered the art of invisibility in real life, so having so many people notice my absence was odd. And, yes, I do finally have heating again now—along with a far greater knowledge of heating systems and diverter valves than I ever wanted or thought necessary. Though, I'm sure I'll find a way to put that knowledge to good use in a story one day. : )

* * *

**Chapter Sixty-Two**

**…****made of glass.**

**Elizabeth**

**7:46 AM**

Given that the helicopter had landed on the lawn at the back of the clinic approximately two minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, much to the perturbation of the pigeons that had been roosting along the upper slat of the split-rail fence that curved along the garden's perimeter, and given that the rain-slick grass would be slippery underfoot, demanding a slightly more cautious pace, Elizabeth reckoned that gave her roughly another six seconds before—

"Are you insane?" Russell stormed through the doorway and into her room.

_Hmmm… Quicker than she'd thought._ "Good morning to you too, Russell."

She reached one hand behind her, pressed it into the cushion of the padded stool, and lowered herself onto the seat, slowing even further still as the movement elicited tweaks of pain that shot through her chest. Her grip on her coffee mug tightened as she fought to keep the wince from her expression.

"Have you completely lost your mind?" Russell's eyes bulged.

"You do know that technically this is my bedroom you keep barging in to."

"Just be thankful it isn't a morgue. This stunt that you've pulled—"

"Stunt?" She quirked an eyebrow.

"You got yourself shot." The whites of his eyes flared again. "Three times."

Her gaze dipped away from his. She shook her head, and her hair quivered against her cheeks. "I was wearing a vest. And besides, that wasn't exactly part of the plan."

"No, I don't suppose it ever is. Not unless your previous death wish has made a sudden vicarious reoccurrence."

She shot him a sharp look—_That was uncalled for_. "Someone had to do something."

"What part of me telling you that the White House would handle it did you not get?"

"You would have slapped sanctions on Russia and played straight into the group's hands."

He eased a step closer, one finger pointed at her. His expression twisted into Menacing Russell, the Russell who had scrutinised her every move and held himself poised to have her fired at the slightest indiscretion back when she first took the job. "I don't know what kind of conspiracy theory you and your staff have been concocting—"

"It's not a conspiracy, Russell—"

"That's what they all say, while fashioning their tin foil hats."

She stared at him—_Seriously?_ Only when he stopped gesturing, let his hand fall back to his side, and kept to his silence, did she continue. "The GRU have gone rogue."

The silence that followed whined through the room.

Russell's eyes widened, and as he stared back at her, a glaze of mild panic swept over his face, something akin to the look he might have given her had she just announced that the voice in her head was telling her that she was a direct descendent of the Silla dynasty and that she was destined to reunite the three kingdoms of Korea.

"Okay…" He spoke slowly. "You really have gone insane."

She rolled her eyes at him, and then gestured towards the door behind him and the world beyond—the world that the walls of the clinic sequestered her from. "That live drop the IC surveilled between the group and the GRU officer was staged."

The '_Don't bait the crazy person_' look deepened.

She raised her voice. "It was meant to make us think that the Kremlin were involved so that we'd retaliate against them, and then they'd retaliate against us, and we'd get so caught up in the escalation that the group would have had the perfect opportunity to make a second attempt."

The image of the Glock and the spray from the kickback brushed up against her mind.

When she tried to shrug the image off, a barbed wave of electricity rippled through her chest, and she concealed her grimace with a sip of coffee. "Or, you know, just skip that bit and shoot me."

"Well, that's not how it looks at our end." Russell stooped towards her, as though he thought that the volume of his voice weren't enough to make her see sense and so he needed her to read his lips as well. He counted off the points on his fingers. "We've got the secretary of state being shot by the Russian foreign minister's bodyguard, said foreign minister leaving said secretary of state for dead and fleeing back to Moscow, the Kremlin on high alert as though they're expecting us to drop bombs over Red Square…" He tossed his hand up. "If they're not involved, then they sure know how to put on a damn convincing performance."

Elizabeth opened her mouth, but then paused and pinned the inside of her cheek between her teeth. Her gaze sailed past Russell and towards the corridor where the beams of sunlight that unspooled through the windows evaporated with a passing cloud. "I admit, when you put it like that, it doesn't look good." She returned to Russell, one hand held up, her fingers splayed. "But have you tried reaching out to the Kremlin?"

He recoiled, and straightening up, he twisted away from her. "Geez, we never thought of that. All this time, and all we needed to do was hit speed dial."

"Okay, I know it's been a long night, but I was the one who got shot, not you."

He spun back to face her, his nostrils flared. "And I'm the one who had to talk POTUS down from actually bombing Red Square when we thought that the Russians had killed you."

She shook her head and spoke in little more than a mutter. "I had a vest on."

"We didn't know that." His voice strained to a shout. "Christ, Elizabeth. When they said that you'd been shot multiple times…" The rise and fall of his chest measured the pause as the end of that sentence wrenched into silence, whilst his gaze bored into her as penetrating as the bullets would have been if it weren't for that vest.

But the longer the stare dragged on, the more prominent the flicker that it held became, like a flame trembling beneath the surface. Russell drew back, and turned away. With his back to her, one hand on his hip beneath his suit jacket, his fingers spread, he added in a mutter, "And a fat lot of good that vest would've done you if he'd shot you in the head."

Elizabeth curled her fingers around her coffee mug. The warmth that seeped out through the ceramic did nothing to fend off the chill that crawled through her skin and stung her bones. "The thought had occurred to me."

The stillness that thickened the air hung like a weighted veil between them. It was a silence she had encountered all too often. One that spoke of an even greater hush, of what might have happened had so much as one link in the chain been different. Churchill was reported to have said, _Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result_. After many brushes with death, Elizabeth had yet to feel the breathless thrill of teetering on and drawing back from the cusp. Instead, it felt as though each near miss caused reality to shear, so that the two paths ran in parallel—the one where she survived and the one where she did not. At first the paths were as tightly entwined as the braids of a rope, so it felt like she was living them both in tandem, but with time that alternative path veered away until the other side became no more than a glimpse at the most. As that path diverged, it took with it a piece of her, a single thread of her being. Though she would be hard-pushed to explain exactly how she had changed, it left her feeling less than whole, so that on some days—on bad days—when the two paths momentarily touched, it left her wondering if perhaps she had gotten it wrong, if perhaps she had been on that alternative path all along and the world around her was merely a construct of her own imagination designed to keep her from seeing the truth, that she was in fact no more than a ghost.

"We'll get back to the Russians in a minute." Russell marched towards the door, but cast a vague gesture behind him, motioning at her t-shirt. "Now, top off."

Elizabeth drew her chin back. "Excuse me?"

"POTUS's orders."

"Conrad told you to sexually harass me?"

Russell shot her a dark look. "Don't flatter yourself." He leant out into the hallway, one hand steadying him against the pale oak door frame, and he beckoned for someone to come in. "DS said you refused to let anyone check you over."

"That's because I'm fine."

"Are you a doctor?" He arched his eyebrows at her whilst a woman with reels of auburn hair gathered into a messy bun and a medical bag weighing down one shoulder staggered inside.

"PhD." Elizabeth's shoulders flinched in a shrug.

Russell studied her, as though he were debating whether to deign to respond to that or not. Then he motioned at her again, drawing a tick from her tee up to the ceiling. "Top off."

Elizabeth stared at him. Perhaps if she stared long enough and hard enough, he'd back down.

But Russell's look didn't so much as falter. "Tick tock."

She resisted the urge to pull a face at him, and instead eased to her feet. The jolts of pain that had been poised to rip through her now shot along the curves of her ribs. She stilled for a moment, drank in a shallow breath, and then when the pain dissipated to no more than an electric simmer, she clunked the coffee mug down onto the dressing table, ignoring the way that both the medic's and Russell's gazes prickled against her. Concern was not an effective analgesic.

Her eyes widened and she gestured for Russell to turn around. _Not a strip show, Russell._

Russell's own eyes bugged, and he held his hands out to the sides—_What's your problem?_ But he conceded and pivoted away to face the corridor.

Elizabeth offered the medic a taut smile and tilted her head towards the cupboard that passed for an en suite. Whilst Elizabeth stepped inside onto the cool vinyl flooring, the medic placed the bag down outside the door and knelt beside it. The rip of the zips opening cut through the room, followed by a snap as the medic pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves.

"Do you need a hand?" The medic motioned to Elizabeth's tee.

Elizabeth shook her head. "I'm fine."

She gripped the hem, and holding her breath, she peeled the cotton up. Each movement jagged against her, and her breath escaped in shaky puffs. She draped the tee over the towel rail and then turned to face the medic.

The medic stared at Elizabeth's chest, and from the tension that spread along her jaw, it looked as though she was trying her best to keep her expression neutral.

A wave of heat rolled up Elizabeth's neck, and she fixed her gaze over the medic's shoulder, towards the wall on the opposite side of the room, the one that the bed was pushed against. In the bottom corner of her vision, Henry's glasses sat as a blur atop the bedside table. She had yet to look at the marks left by the bullets for herself, but given her pain and the expression on the medic's face, she had a feeling that Henry would not be pleased to see her looking like this. Nothing plunged them into a fight quite like his insistence that she was being reckless with her life, even if it were for the greater good. Funny how he forgot that argument the moment the roles were reversed.

The medic brushed her gloved fingertips along Elizabeth's ribs, and the moment Elizabeth sucked in a breath and winced, her gaze darted up. "Any pain?"

Elizabeth clenched her jaw. "It's fine."

The prods grew harder, each one like a heat-laced needle driving into raw flesh. Nausea roiled at the pit of Elizabeth's stomach and saliva flooded her mouth, metallic and thick. She clenched her jaw even tighter. _Don't throw up. Don't throw up. Don't throw up._

"Feeling okay?"

Elizabeth gave a firm nod and forced herself to swallow. "Fine."

The medic eyed her warily. "Okay…" She unwound the stethoscope from around her neck. "I need to have a listen to your chest."

The kiss of the stethoscope against Elizabeth's skin stung just as much, and she flinched back. At the medic's concerned look, she forced a grim smile. "It's cold."

The comment did nothing to alleviate that expression though. "Okay. Deep breath."

Elizabeth drew in a shallow breath.

The medic looked up at her, expectant. "Deep breath."

Elizabeth clamped her teeth together and dared herself to take a breath. When her lungs expanded and pressed outwards on her ribs, ribbons of pain seared hot streaks throughout her chest and a cry slipped out before she could stifle it with her fist.

The medic raised her eyebrows at Elizabeth. "Does that hurt?"

Elizabeth's breath escaped in a rush. "Christ, yes."

"Good." Russell snapped from where he lingered near the door that led out to the hallway. "Maybe it'll make you think twice before doing something like this again."

The medic continued to listen, prod and probe, urging Elizabeth to take deep breath after deep breath, offering her sympathetic looks as she winced or strained against the jolts of pain or the occasional curse huffed its way out. By the time they had finished and the medic had told Elizabeth that she could get dressed, it felt as though a team of railroad workers had taken their sledgehammers to her ribs until even the brush of cool air against her skin drove splinters into her nerve ends. All she could hope for was that the pain would be worth it in the end; it was a price she'd willingly pay if it brought those responsible for poisoning Will to justice and if it kept her family safe.

"It looks as though your ribs are bruised," the medic said when Elizabeth emerged from the bathroom, having eased her t-shirt back on with her eyes closed so that she wouldn't have to look at the damage to her chest, "though I can't rule out a fracture. They're not broken though, and that's the main thing. We can manage it conservatively, painkillers and ice, and they'll get better with time. But it's important that you keep moving and try to breathe normally in order to avoid the risk of infection. If the pain gets any worse, or if it moves to your shoulder or stomach, or if you have any trouble breathing, any coughing up blood, a fever, coughing up mucus…then you need to be seen by a doctor straight away." She shot Elizabeth a pointed look as she zipped up the medical bag. "No trying to tough it out."

Elizabeth gave the medic a stiff smile. "Thanks."

The medic slung the strap of the bag over her shoulder and nodded to Russell on her way out.

Russell waited until the screech of footsteps off the linoleum had faded down the corridor before he spoke. "Well, at least that avoids another trip to the hospital. I don't know how much longer we can keep this whole thing quiet, and I'd rather not be reading in more medical staff." Whilst the medic had assessed Elizabeth in the en suite, Russell had picked up the marl grey sweatshirt that Elizabeth had worn during the meeting with Avdonin; she hadn't looked at that yet either, just flung it onto the chair in the corner. He held it out in front of him and examined the side where the bullets had torn through. Then he glanced at her. "I suppose it goes without saying, but you need to talk about what happened with Dr Sherman, before this becomes an issue too."

"I'm not made of glass, Russell. Not every little thing that happens to me makes me fall apart." She lifted her mug from the dressing table and lowered herself onto the padded stool that stuck out from beneath. "I'm more concerned that Kostov's still out there along with God knows how many others…" Her chest tightened, though this time the ache came from within. A second attempt had always been a possibility, as had accomplices within the US, but the shooting made it real; she couldn't ignore the distinct chance that someone might turn a gun on Henry or Will or the kids, and they certainly wouldn't be wearing body armour. "We need to find Kostov and put an end to this now. The shooter—"

"DOA."

Her shoulders slumped. Why did every lead have to fizzle out?

"But the FBI and IC are getting into it, see if they can't connect the dots."

She shook her head. "The longer this drags on, the more desperate Kostov and the group will get. You need to let the Kremlin know that I'm still alive, get them away from this defensive posture and get them to help."

"How?" Russell held his hands out wide, the sweater still bunched in one fist. "The whole of Moscow have switched their phones to 'Do Not Disturb'."

Elizabeth raised her coffee mug to her lips, but lowered it again before she had the chance to take a sip. "Reach out to the Russian ambassador. Have him pass word to Avdonin."

"How can you be sure Avdonin's not involved?"

"I got a good read on him when I spoke to him." The flash of horror in Avdonin's eyes when the first _crack_ rang out resurfaced in her mind. She blinked it away again. "And he didn't know what was going to happen."

"So—" Russell gave a stilted shrug. "—the Kremlin didn't read him in."

"It's more than that. When I brought up the GRU going rogue, he admitted it…well, as much as he could admit it without actually admitting it. And when I explained our interest in Kostov and what would happen if they refused to help, he agreed that the Kremlin would assist with the investigation… Or at least hypothetically."

"We can't conduct diplomacy on a hunch or hypotheticals."

"Then give them a chance to respond." She fixed him with a firm stare. This was their best chance of catching Kostov; he had to get on board with it. "Tell Avdonin that I'm alive and that the deal still stands. Then see what they do."

Russell's eyes took on a glassy sheen as he pondered that suggestion, whilst his eyebrows crept into an arch. "I suppose it's better than getting into a shoot-out with Moscow." His gaze sharpened on her, and he motioned to her chest. "No pun intended." Though the slight smirk that played at the corners of his lips said he wasn't entirely displeased with his word choice. "I'll have POTUS hold out on sanctions for now, but if they don't keep up their end of the deal—"

Elizabeth nodded. "They know the consequences."

"But do you?" He stared at her, and let the words linger for a moment before he continued. "If they leak your location to the press…"

"Another reason why I'm convinced that I'm right. When Avdonin threatened to expose me, just the suggestion of us releasing a statement saying that the GRU have gone rogue was enough to make him think better of it." She masked her lips behind the rim of her coffee cup, and gave a small shrug. "If there was no truth in it, they'd just deny it."

Russell considered that, and either he was coming round to her so-called crazy conspiracy theory, or he realised that they didn't have a better idea. He scratched at the back of his neck, and then let his shoulders sag in a soundless sigh. "Well, as I said, I'll talk to POTUS. But in the meantime, no more unauthorised meetings, no more stealing your detail's phones, no more sneaking outside." He counted off the points on his fingers once more. "From now on, the staff are going to change the code on a daily basis, and the next DS agent to assist you in one of your _plans_ will be fired. Without appeal. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal."

"Good." The word shot through the room, and he stared at her as though he were trying to laser the message into her mind.

Then he drew back and strode towards the door. He held up the sweatshirt still clutched in his fist. "Oh, and I'm borrowing this."

Elizabeth shook her head to herself and muttered, "You can keep it."

She eased herself around on the stool so that she faced the dressing table. Watery sunlight flowed through the window behind. The therapy file rested at the back, in line with the mirror; it felt as though it was staring at her, goading her into filling out the worksheets. During her meeting with Avdonin, the image of Will convulsing on the backseat of the SUV had threatened the edges of her vision, dragged in by the scent of damp air and the rain against her skin. She ought to record it. That, and the fact that she had opted to power through on coffee instead of attempting to sleep. But rather than reaching for the file or biro, she continued to clutch the coffee mug.

_Later. She'd do it later._

"Bess…"

At Russell's voice, her gaze darted to the mirror. The reflection showed that he hadn't left as she had thought, but instead stood in the doorway watching her.

"You're not made of glass, but trying to tough it out is what got you here." He leant back and cast a glance up and down the corridor. When he returned to her, his voice softened. "You're doing well. Don't let this—" He held up the sweatshirt. "—set you back. Okay?"

Elizabeth paused. She held his gaze in the mirror, and for a moment it felt as though she _were_ made of glass, as though with one look anyone could witness all the thoughts that swam inside her head; and whilst others could see the thoughts in their entirety and understand them for what they were, she—with her own perspective so close—could catch no more than a glimpse of them. And how was she meant to garner meaning from a passing glance, like trying to picture a fish when she could see no more than one of its scales? The White House might be beginning to trust her judgment, or at least trust her judgment enough to hold out on sanctions and see what came of her plan, but at what point could she trust herself?

"Take care of yourself." His gaze continued to bounce off the mirror and whistle straight through her. "Let DS do their job, and we'll keep your family safe."

She nodded. "Thank you, Russell."

He turned to leave. But his fingers remained gripped around the door frame. He stilled for a moment, just long enough to mutter, "I'm glad you were wearing that vest."

And then he let go and strode away. The soles of his shoes elicited a sharp squeak from the linoleum floor with each step.

Elizabeth stared at the empty doorway in the reflection. In the corridor outside, motes of dust spiralled through the sunlight; it felt as though they alone formed the veil between the path she had taken and the path that she would have taken had the bullets struck anywhere other than her chest.

"Me too," she whispered.

Though she couldn't escape the feeling that perhaps her family would have been safer had the attempt been a success.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	65. Chapter Sixty-Three: a little show-an

**Note:** When will we get Henry and Elizabeth!? — Soon. (In one timeline or another.) Starting with Chapter Sixty-Five '...exposure.'.

* * *

**Chapter Sixty-Three**

**…****a little show-and-tell.**

**Stevie**

**9:41 AM**

People swarmed through the hallway outside Russell Jackson's office, and not just the usual blur of charcoal, black and navy blue suits, but many in rigid military uniform too; though, perhaps most telling were those in wrinkled jeans and plaid shirts so crumpled that they looked like they'd been fished out of a laundry basket and thrown on at two AM.

Sat behind her desk, Stevie held a biro between both hands and twisted it back and forth, the movement becoming quicker and quicker with each person that strode past. _Everything was okay. Everything was okay. Everything was—_

"Why's it so busy here today?" Stevie stilled her fingers and turned to Adele.

With her gaze fixed on the file opened across the desk in front of her, Adele arched her eyebrows and dragged a highlighter along the edge of a metal ruler, marking the page in neon green. "Because…it's the White House."

Stevie paused. _Right… _And then she nodded. _No need to be concerned_.

But a second or so later, the jitter in her fingers resumed.

Adele shot her a look, one tinged with what could have been either disapproval or concern. "How much coffee have you had this morning?"

Stevie stopped. She lowered the pen to the desk. The rattle of plastic as it dropped the last few millimetres and hit the wood trembled into the room. "A few cups."

Adele's eyebrows rose even higher, and as she returned her gaze to the file, she shook her head to herself. "You're getting as bad as Russell."

The fug of coffee and one too many sprays of cologne wafted through from the corridor as more people sailed past; it was heightened by the stale heat pumped out by the radiators, leaving the air feeling twice as dense and entirely lacking in oxygen.

Stevie tore her gaze away from the hall, and looked to Adele again. "Speaking of Russell…" She forced a smile and tried to keep it casual. But her brow crumpled into a frown. "Where is he exactly?"

"He didn't say."

"But did something happen? Last night… Or perhaps early this morning?" Stevie wrapped her hands around her mug, though the ceramic held no more than a ghost of warmth and the aroma of coffee had turned nauseating at least half an hour ago.

"As I said, it's the White House, honey. If something isn't happening, that's when you know there's something wrong."

The last of Stevie's smile dwindled. _Right. Of course…_

Perhaps what her father had said was true, that the _feeling_ they'd all had was nothing more than concern and that someone would have let them know if anything were wrong. And wasn't it silly—childish even—to let a midnight fear smoulder on long after the glow of the television had cut out and daylight had swept away the shadows that lurked at the edges of each room?

Yet still that feeling gripped her. A thread of unease that swirled amidst the churn of coffee at the pit of her stomach. Whether it stemmed from the stepped up security or from an inexplicable form of intuition didn't matter; the rationality behind it remained the same. If the people who had poisoned her mother and Uncle Will did try again, as slim a risk as her father would have them believe and as likely a chance as Russell asserted it was, and if this time they were to succeed, she and her family wouldn't just be pushing Christmas back to January or June, and no matter how much her mother would want her—would expect her—to move on, never again would she be able to hang an ornament on the tree, at least not without an overwhelming tug of loss.

"Adele."

At the rasp of Russell's voice, Stevie blinked and her gaze darted back to the doorway.

Russell braced himself against the door frame, a marl grey sweatshirt loosely folded and clutched in one hand. "I need you to push back my meetings. Anything that can be rearranged, rearrange. Everything else…tell the guys at NASA that they need to create an extra hour—or three—in the day." He pushed himself away from the door frame and turned to leave, but less than half a second later he ducked back again. "Oh, and tell my wife that she'll need a new plus-one for that…_thing—_" He fumbled for the word. "—I was meant to be attending this evening."

"Anything else?" Adele jotted down a note.

"And have someone send a car round." The end of the sentence faded as he disappeared into the corridor. Then, as an afterthought, came the strained shout— "Thank you."

Stevie stumbled to her feet, skirted around the edge of the desk and hurried out into the hallway. "Russell?" she shouted after him whilst he marched away, the fronts of his suit jacket flapping open, his pace alone enough to scatter the oncoming stream of people to the sides.

Russell kept walking, but he called back as he went, "Don't worry. She's fine."

Stevie froze, her mouth open, her lips stuck in an 'O', whilst the flow of suits broke around her where she stood in the middle of the corridor. That's all she'd wanted to hear since two o'clock that morning. And it would have been comforting, had he not said it before she'd had the chance to ask.

* * *

**Matt**

**10:23 AM**

The smell of stale beer, sweat, and congealed cheese on top of cold pizza mingled with the aroma of coffee and formed a low-lying fog in the air of the conference room, one that hung at shoulder height, oozed into every pore and pressed up against the senses.

"God." Daisy halted one step inside the doors, and wrinkled her nose. "What crawled in here and died? It smells worse than a frat house the morning after a kegger."

From his seat at the desk in the corner, his head buried in his hands, Blake groaned. "Please don't. I already feel like someone's dipped me in a vat of human effluvia."

Matt stopped pivoting back and forth in his chair, and pushed himself up from the seat. "So you haven't showered in twenty-four hours?" He leant in towards Blake and grabbed up the last slice of pepperoni from the grease-daubed cardboard box. "It's not a big deal."

Blake lifted his head, and with eyes threaded red with spider veins, he stared at Matt. "Twenty-nine hours, twenty-three minutes and thirteen seconds." His voice sharpened. "How does that not make your skin crawl with unclean?"

Daisy looked around the group. "Wait…" Her eyes widened as she took in their crumpled shirts and slackened ties, their suit jackets shed. "Have you guys been here all night?"

Sat at the head of the table, Jay hid a grim smile beneath the rim of his coffee cup. "It's within the realm of possibility."

"Is this to do with what's going on at the White House?"

"What's going on at the White House?" Matt asked through a mouthful of cold pizza. He held one hand cupped beneath his chin, ready to catch the straggles of mozzarella that dangled down and threatened to drop.

Daisy shrugged. "All I know's that everyone who's anyone's been piling in."

Blake stared out into the main hall, and a look of mild horror dawned on his face, followed by a wave of panic. It looked as though he were debating whether or not to throw himself beneath the desk. "Not quite everyone."

"Her office. Now." Russell Jackson barged past Daisy and straight through the side entrance into the secretary's office, a grey sweatshirt clutched in one hand.

With his mouth still open, the pizza poised for another bite, Matt froze. He lowered the slice back to the box and then dusted off his hands, whilst dread wrapped so thickly around his stomach that he couldn't have eaten another mouthful if he'd wanted to. The anxious looks that swept between him, Kat, Blake and Jay said that they felt the same way.

Daisy's gaze darted to each of them in turn. "Is there something I should know about?"

"I said: Now." Russell's shout came from the secretary's office.

Another look passed between them as no one dared to move.

Then Blake tossed up his hands. "Fine."

He braced himself against the arms of the seat, and the wheels of the chair squeaked as he pushed himself up to standing. He smoothed down his tie and shirt, buttoned up his blazer, and then led the way through, Kat and Jay a few reluctant paces behind. Matt followed Daisy into the office and then pulled the door to with a heavy clunk that shook through the room.

Russell stood in front of the coffee table. The mellow haze of sunlight crept through the net curtains behind him. He swivelled his gaze around the rough semicircle that the staff had formed. "Which of you small-minded simpletons thought it would be a good idea to give out the secretary's location—a location that is strictly classified and that you shouldn't even know about, I might add—to the Russians?"

Daisy turned her chin towards her shoulder. The whites of her eyes flared as she shot Matt a look and hissed, "Tell me you didn't."

"Shhh." Matt raised one finger to his lips and hushed her just as Russell's gaze swept towards them.

"Well?" Russell said, the word as sharp as a bark.

Silence hung over the office as thick as the fog of stale scents that had steeped the air of the conference room.

Russell held his arms out wide, the sweater swaying from one hand, and he pivoted to face each of them in turn. "What? No takers?"

Jay leant back against the edge of the secretary's desk and folded his arms loosely over his chest, deepening the creases in his shirt. "Can't you just tell us what this is about?"

Russell's gaze locked on him. "This is about the fact that I explicitly told you that you were not to tell anyone where she was, you were not to contact her or disturb her in anyway—"

"To be fair, she called us." Matt folded his arms too.

"So, one of them talks." Russell's voice shot up in mock surprise. "Perhaps now you can tell me whose moment of genius led to an unauthorised meeting between the secretary and Minister Avdonin." When the silence flooded back in, he looked around them again. His gaze lingered for a touch more than a second before it flitted on to the next person. "And I already know from DS's statement that it was arranged by this office, so either I can pull all the records and find out who's responsible, or you can give me a straight answer and save us all the hassle."

Matt cast a sideways glance towards the others. Blake had found sudden fascination in the spot of carpet just beyond the toes of his shoes, Jay stared wide-eyed past Russell as though he were drinking in the sight of his career being blown to pieces right in front of him, whilst Kat's jaw radiated tension and her expression darkened with the nick in her brow.

"I'm waiting." The sing-song lilt of Russell's tone lifted into the air. "Five, four, three, two—"

Jay's shoulders slumped in a deflated sigh, and with one arm still folded across his chest, he raised the opposite hand. "That would be me."

Matt frowned. "Wait, no—"

But Jay silenced him with a shake of the head. "It was my call."

"But I was there." Matt turned to Russell. "I helped arrange it too."

"So did I." Kat met Russell with a defiant stare.

"I set up the call," Blake said.

Russell stared at each of them, his expression twisting into a snarl, and then he looked to Daisy, expectant. "What? You're not going to join the rest of the Spartacuses?"

Matt nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Spartaci."

Russell arched his eyebrows at him and loomed closer. "You think that's funny, son?"

Matt swallowed. "I was going for grammatically accurate."

At the dark look Russell gave him, he shrank half a step back.

The ends of Daisy's hair trembled around her shoulders as she shook her head. "I don't have a clue what's going on."

Russell kept his glare on Matt whilst he spoke to Daisy. "Well, I guess that in this instance, your ignorance gives you a free pass."

"A free pass from what?" Kat lifted her chin towards Russell, a challenge.

"Here." Russell chucked the sweater at Daisy. "Hold this up."

"What is it?" Daisy's brow furrowed as she unfolded the sweater.

"A little show-and-tell." Russell beckoned for her to stand beside him.

Daisy held the sweatshirt by the shoulders so that it overlaid her chest, as though she were checking in a mirror to see if it suited her or not, but her chin dipped, and as she stared down at the front, the ends of her hair swayed over the fabric.

The faded black lettering of the slogan 'COLFAX 34 TRACK' emblazoned across the marl grey, but three thread-frazzled holes, each singed charcoal at the edges, disrupted the text.

"Wait…" Blake's brow gathered into a frown. "Isn't that the secretary's?"

"As a matter of fact, it is." The glimmer in Russell's voice was more menacing than his snarl.

"But…" Kat paused, and she swept an anxious glance around the others, as though to make sure that they were all seeing the same as she did. "Aren't those bullet holes?"

"As a matter of fact, they are."

Matt's guts turned to water. Ice cold. He tugged at his mouth and chin, whilst all thought deserted him and his mind scrambled in the vortex of silence, searching for something—anything—to latch onto. _The secretary…bullet holes…shot…_ Incoherent fragments whipped past before finally his mind found a grasp: the fabric surrounding each scorched-edged hole was grey, not sodden or maroon or stained.

His hand fell away, and he motioned to the sweatshirt. "There's no blood."

Russell stared him down. He let that statement linger. "You're right. There's not… Now, ten points to whoever can name the organs that those bullets would've hit had DS not insisted she wear a bulletproof vest to the meeting with Avdonin."

No one replied.

The absence of words held a weight of its own, as though each second that passed without sound forced the ceiling lower and the walls closer until the pressure of the silence swelled inside and demanded release.

"Well, this makes MSec's pop quizzes look positively upbeat," Matt muttered.

"What did you say?" Russell spun to face him.

Matt shook his head and shrank back. "Nothing."

Whilst Russell's glower simmered over Matt, Blake cleared his throat and gestured to the sweatshirt. "Stomach, liver and…" His throat bobbed. The word caught. "…heart."

"Right," Russell said. "And given her current location, who thinks an ambulance would have reached her, let alone got her to a hospital, before she bled to death?"

A shadow sailed across the windows. It turned the curtains murky grey and dragged a gloom over the office. When the secretary said she knew the risks, did she really anticipate that?

"Good. So, we're all on the same page." Russell snatched the sweatshirt from Daisy and motioned for her to rejoin the rest of them in their loose arc.

"But is she okay?" Blake asked.

Russell gave a half-nod. His voice softened. "Bruised, but she'll survive."

"What happened?" Jay wrapped his fingers over the edge of the desk where he perched. At the flex in his wrist, his watch caught a glimmer of cold light.

"One of Avdonin's bodyguards."

Kat's brow pinched. "Did Avdonin know?"

"Not according to the secretary," Russell said. Then the corner of his lips flinched. "But he left her for dead and fled back to Moscow."

A slight pout joined Blake's worried frown. "Considerate."

"You're going to reach out to the Russian ambassador and tell him to pass word to Minister Avdonin that the secretary's alive and her offer still stands. Give him the chance to make amends, and prove that she didn't get herself shot for nothing."

"So—" Jay lingered over the word, and his gaze checked in with the others before he continued. "Avdonin agreed to help?"

"Apparently so."

Kat gave a mouth shrug. "Maybe her plan wasn't so crazy after all."

Russell's expression darkened again, and the sharpness returned to his tone. "Let's not forget that she put herself in a direct line of fire, and it wouldn't have mattered one iota whether her plan was crazy or not had she been shot in the head."

With his arms folded across his chest, Matt shook his head. "Shooters almost never go for the head. You want to go for the centre of mass. Bigger target, less movement."

The look Russell gave him said that, given the opportunity, he'd have him shot. Head or not, it wouldn't have mattered. "Just contact the ambassador." He paced backwards towards the main door, his gaze still fixed on them. "And from now on, none of you are to so much as breathe without the White House's permission, or else you'll all be fired."

"You do know that technically you can't fire us," Jay said, and when Russell stopped, he gave a shrug. "Only the secretary can."

Russell's voice strained. "Then perhaps you ought to be a little more invested in keeping her alive, otherwise one of these lunatics will actually kill her and her replacement will turf you out faster than you can say 'Kevlar'." The final word shot out and tumbled into the silence.

When the last of it had echoed away, Russell turned and strode out.

A moment later, the door shut with a slam that juddered through the walls.

Blake's brow furrowed as he pivoted to face the rest of them. "Sorry… But why are we letting them know that she's still alive…? Surely if this group think that they've killed her, then they won't make another attempt."

Daisy shot him an incredulous look. "You seriously think we should put out a statement saying that the secretary of state is dead?" Her eyes widened, her eyebrows arched. "_Dead_?"

Blake's lips drew into a tight pout, and the faraway glaze to his eyes said that, having heard it back, he was reconsidering that suggestion.

Daisy tossed one hand up, her fingers flared. "The press would have a field day, not to mention the backlash when we told them it'd all been some elaborate hoax to deter the assassins who the FBI failed to catch, by the way."

Jay shook his head, whilst his shoulders raised and his grip on the edge of the desk tightened. "Plus, it would allow any members of the group still in the US to get away, and they'd probably just send someone else over once they found out she was still alive."

Kat cast her gaze towards the floor, her hands stuffed into her trouser pockets. "Not to mention the fact that if Russia think the US are going to retaliate for their citizens killing her, they'll be on high alert and might try to preempt any perceived threat by attacking first."

Matt nodded to that, and then looked to Blake with a smile full of false cheer. "Salnikov's probably restocking the silos as we speak."

"Right," Blake said. He paused for a moment, and then pointed towards the door. "So, I guess I'll just go set up that call then."

Jay clapped him on the shoulder.

Blake strode away, and his pained expression only deepened with each step.

Daisy sank down onto one of the armchairs in front of the secretary's desk. She clutched the armrest whilst she gestured with the opposite hand; the gold bangles around her wrist chimed off one another. "First the poisoning, then this thing with her brother, now getting shot. Do we really think she's coming back after this?" She looked up at them, the whites of her eyes filled with concern. When none of them replied, she continued with a shake of the head. "I mean, I'm no psychiatrist, but isn't she meant to be focusing on therapy? Not organising unauthorised meetings with the Russian foreign minister, solving the investigation into her own attempted assassination, and risking her life in the process."

Silence rolled through the room, as heavy as damp air.

"She sounded well on the phone," Jay offered with a slight wince.

"And she's never exactly been fond of the rules," Matt said.

Kat's eyebrows arched, whilst her gaze remained fixed on the floor. "And if she managed to win over Avdonin and secure Russia's cooperation, that's got to be progress." Then her gaze darted up and swivelled to each of them in turn. Uncertainty shone in her eyes. "Right?"

* * *

**Elizabeth**

**2:13 PM**

What Elizabeth had hated most about spy reunions, aside from the fact that her ex-colleagues would so often get an urgent call that would see her left dining alone with meals laid out for four, was the reminder that she no longer had the same power to affect the world. She had gone from chess player to someone who wasn't allowed to see the board. Perhaps it wouldn't have bothered her, had she not been aware that the game was going on—_ignorance really is bliss_, after all—but knowing that the others were plotting moves that would affect the course of history in ways that only they would ever understand, whilst the most she had to plot was how to get all three kids to school and make it to her lecture by nine, made her feel insignificant and it filled her with a sense of loss for the time when her decisions and actions had formed part of the vast web of moves that would dictate the state of the world's board for decades to come. Perhaps that was why Conrad's promise that in becoming his secretary of state she could affect true change in the world had made the job an easy sell.

That, along with the sting of guilt that struck her when he reminded her of how she had let him down before.

Last night, the meeting with Minister Avdonin had given her a taste of that gameplay again. For a brief bubble of time, she had been influencing others and shaping the path that the US and Russia would follow, both in terms of their ongoing relations and with regards to the investigation.

But then she got shot.

And the bubble popped.

And now she found herself trapped within the clinic's walls, expected to carry on with her day as though she weren't aware that the game was being played out, content in the knowledge that the White House had taken charge. Perhaps any other person would have felt the warm wash of relief that comes with someone else taking control, a sense of gratitude that she could sit back and worry no more.

But not her.

As she stared out of the window of the therapy room and towards the black walnut tree that stood across the car park, the glass in front of her fogging beneath each shallow sip of breath, an itch of frustration stirred inside her, as though each lurch of the spidering boughs in the winter breeze plucked at threads tethered to the ends of her nerves, leaving them frizzled and liable to spark. To surrender the board was one thing, as ineffectual as she had felt each time her ex-colleagues had abandoned her to take their classified calls, but to have it snatched away from her all because she'd yet to earn a piece of paper saying that she was fit for work…? It made her hunger to be brought back into the game even keener than before.

The fact that the shooting had raised the stakes fuelled that hunger as well. The poisoning had taken planning, but pulling a gun like that had been a desperate attempt, and the more that desperation festered, the more likely it became that the group would widen their net. And if they couldn't get to her, how long would it be before her family got caught up in this web?

Again.

A gust hurtled through the branches of the tree and churned up a flash of the dream from beneath the surface of her mind. For a moment, the fibres of the carpet turned to plumes of grass that brushed against her bare soles; the chill that squeezed around the edges of the windowpane prickled the hairs of her arm to attention, like the whip of the breeze as she ran; and a voice echoed out—_Take my hand_.

"You need to sign me off." The words misted the glass.

Silence gaped through the room. Its jaws widened until the metronomic _clunk-clunk-clunk _of the clock dragged out to twice its normal length and then slowed into reverse.

Elizabeth turned her back on the black walnut tree. She would have folded her arms across her chest had the ache in her ribs not warned her it would hurt. "You need to sign me off."

"I heard what you said." Dr Sherman had twisted around in the armchair to face Elizabeth where she stood in front of the sheet of glass, and she studied Elizabeth, as though assessing her pore by pore.

"Yet you chose not to respond."

"It didn't sound like you were asking for a response." She wore an impassive smile, one as subtle and expertly-applied as her nude lipstick.

Elizabeth opened her mouth, her tongue poised to click off her palate. An expletive had popped to mind, but she let it slide away before she spoke. "I'm ready to go back to work."

"I'd be interested to know what makes you think that."

She clutched one hip through the cushion of her cardigan. Her opposite hand gestured of its own accord whilst she listed off the reasons, all the while turning her head from side to side to avoid the persistence of Dr Sherman's gaze. "My mood's stable, I've not had another panic attack, I'm dealing with my triggers…"

"So, nothing to do with you being shot?"

Elizabeth stilled. Her lips tensed.

"How do you feel about being shot?"

"I'd've preferred it if he'd hit ten inches above my head, but I guess hitting me in a bulletproof vest is an acceptable second."

The corners of Dr Sherman's lips quirked before she could rein back her smile. "I'd have thought that not getting shot at all would have been the most preferable outcome."

Elizabeth bit down on the inside of her cheek, and shook her head. "I can't control that."

"You could chose not to put yourself in a position where you're at risk of being shot."

"I'm the secretary of state—supposedly. If I did that, I'd never be able to leave the house."

Dr Sherman's gaze followed Elizabeth, an ever-present prickle as she padded around the side of the armchair, past the coffee table, and picked up her mug from where it balanced atop the arm of the couch. The cup left behind a sagging crater in the leather, a pockmark, warm to the touch.

"And how does that make you feel? Knowing that your life is at risk?"

Elizabeth wrapped her hands around the mug, her gaze fixed on Dr Sherman over the brim as she took a sip of coffee. She shrugged. "It's part of the job." She lowered herself to perch on the arm of the couch. Another sip. A bitter drag down the back of her throat. "A job I'd like to return to, hence why I need you to sign me off."

"Most people would be shaken by an attempt on their life, yet you're eager to put yourself straight back into the line of fire, so to speak."

"I'm in the line of fire whether I'm at work or not. At least at work I can help catch the people responsible rather than just sitting around here waiting for something to happen, waiting to hear that my family have been hurt."

Dr Sherman's eyes narrowed. She folded her hands over the end of the notebook that rested in her lap. "Is that why you want to leave? You're concerned about your family?"

"I want to leave because I've been here long enough."

Dr Sherman shook her head. The hoops of her earrings swayed against her hair and cast off golden glimmers. Shots of light. "I'd say you haven't been here long enough if, when something like this happens, your first instinct is to run rather than taking the time to talk about it and giving yourself space to process."

"God." Elizabeth's clutch on the cup tightened until it felt like the ceramic might crack. "Not every single thing that happens to me needs dissecting. Just because I got shot—in a bulletproof vest—doesn't mean that I'm going to fall apart."

"You're right, it doesn't. But the change in your mood, your instinct telling you to run—"

"I'm not trying to run."

"Yesterday you were talking openly, you were engaging with the programme, you didn't have this preoccupation with going back to work. Today, it feels like we're back to where we were a couple of weeks ago, with you being determined to leave at any cost."

Elizabeth turned away. She stared towards the artificial ficus tree in the corner, and rubbed the tips of her thumbs along the brim of the mug. "We all have our ups and downs."

"We do, but until I can see that your downs don't cause you to spiral and that you're prioritising your mental health, I can't sign you off."

Elizabeth took another sip of coffee as she continued to study the silk-look polyester leaves. Bitterness unfurled over her tongue.

"If you go back to work, you're always going to be at risk of trauma. I need to know that the next time something like this happens, you'll reach out, rather than reacting how you did after the incident with your brother."

Elizabeth snapped back to face Dr Sherman. The jagged-edged pain that shot along her ribs only heightened the strain in her voice. "And I need to go back to work to make sure that nothing like this happens to him again, or to my husband or my kids." She flung a gesture towards the window and earnt herself another jolt sharp enough to elicit a thick tug of nausea. "What happens if, while I'm sat in here talking about my _feelings_, someone pulls a gun on them instead?"

"From what I understand, there's been no threat. You're the target, not them."

"Until I'm not." The words thrust themselves out. Three more bullets. Elizabeth shook her head, her jaw clenched. "If something happens to them…" Her chest tightened and strangled the end of that thought. "I will never—_never_—forgive myself."

Dr Sherman eyed her with a steady gaze. She let that statement settle before she spoke. "If something did happen to them, it wouldn't be your fault."

"Of course it would. I should've helped the investigation from day one, I should've used my voice when I had the chance, I should never have let myself get like this." Elizabeth motioned to herself, as though in a single gesture she could encapsulate every decision she had made and everything she had become since the day of the poisoning, from lying to the FBI, to yelling at Henry, to seeing herself in the mirrors, collapsed in a ball on the foyer floor.

She pushed herself up from the armrest and paced the floor behind the couch. One hand clutched the mug in front of her chest; the other raked her hair back and held it there.

"You're still carrying a lot of guilt over what happened."

Elizabeth snorted. "Well, if you're expecting me to let go of that, you'll never sign me off."

"In an ideal world, you'd be able to forgive yourself for any part—direct or indirect—that you believe you've played in this, but my primary concern here isn't to change the way you feel but to change the way in which you respond to how you feel."

"And how, exactly, am I meant to respond?"

"Talking about how you feel would be a start."

"I'm talking now, aren't I?"

"You are, but mostly about how you'd like to leave."

Elizabeth stopped pacing. She gripped the back of the couch, and her fingernails dug into the leather whilst she stared Dr Sherman down.

But Dr Sherman didn't so much as flinch, just continued to look up at Elizabeth with that expression of pure tolerance. Elizabeth could probably hurl every insult in every language she knew at Dr Sherman, and still Dr Sherman would meet her with the same gentle smile, there but not there, silently assessing but never judgmental. It was almost as irritating as that look Henry wore, the one that said—_I'm not mad at you, just disappointed, that's all._

Dr Sherman held her gaze. "The path to recovery is often two steps forward, one step back. Today has been a step back, but if you were to stay here and work through this, I would consider that a major stride towards you being ready to be signed off."

Elizabeth paused. Her eyes narrowed. "How major?"

"I want you to be back at work as much as you do, but the purpose of this isn't to earn a piece of paper; it's to make sure that you don't need to come back."

"I was looking for a timeframe."

Dr Sherman's smile grew. "I know you were."

Elizabeth's gaze sailed away until it locked on the red panic button that glared back at her from the wall next to the door. The _bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep _that had rung out on the night of the flashback and panic attack still pulsed in some recess of her mind. Whether it had even been real or not, she didn't know, but at the time it had felt like a wake up call. Whilst she knew that the other patients had their problems and she'd never judge them for that, she couldn't imagine that she'd ever become someone whose behaviour merited the cry of that alarm. Yet there she was, curled up on the floor whilst her mind flung her through time, and she couldn't so much as breathe let alone return to work or go back home. She'd promised herself that night that she'd never let that happen again, that the next time she left she'd be herself once more and ready to go home. But was she ready now?

Her instinct said, _Yes._

But the more she thought about it, the more her mind told her, _No._

When she and Will were still kids, before the accident put an end to their childhood, their father used to take them out fishing on the lake near their home. One time, when they were about to head back to shore, the motor had whirred and sputtered into life, yet the boat strained and barely chugged along. It took a good five minutes before they realised that Will hadn't raised the anchor and it was dragging along the bottom. She felt like that boat now, caught between the drive to leave and the weight of logic pulling her back, yet rather than puttering towards the shore, she'd been brought to a standstill, and only by stopping and taking the time to work through her issues would she be able to raise that anchor and move on.

Elizabeth tore her gaze away from the panic alarm. "I feel trapped and powerless and like everything is out of my control." She plucked at the leather seam of the couch cushion, and as her chin dipped, her hair swept forwards to veil her face. "Last night, for a moment, I felt like myself again and I could genuinely see a way forward. But no sooner do I think that than someone pulls a gun on me…" Her eyebrows arched and lingered there. Then she shook her head, and lifted her gaze to meet Dr Sherman's. "I just want this all to be over so that things can go back to normal."

Dr Sherman held to her neutral expression, her hands loosely clasped atop the notebook in her lap. But there was a sharpness to her eyes that said she was mulling over that thought. She opened her mouth a moment or two before she spoke, as though giving the words one final weigh on the tip of her tongue before she delivered them. "While I appreciate how worrying it must be to know that there are people out there who would do you harm, I think it's important to remember that there are two types of 'normal' that we're trying to achieve here."

A light frown gripped Elizabeth's brow.

"Through the investigation, you're trying to achieve 'normal' in terms of your safety, but through our sessions, we're trying to achieve 'normal' in terms of your well-being. My concern is that you might be conflating the two."

Elizabeth's fingers curled, and her nails bit into the leather. "I'd say that my well-being's vastly improved if I'm alive and not peppered with bullet holes, and I wouldn't have to worry half as much if I knew that my family were safe."

"I agree that resolving this case is important for you and your family going forward, but capturing the people responsible won't address the trauma that you've been through."

The next breath Elizabeth took felt empty, as though maybe one of the bullets had torn through her lungs after all. "You don't want me assisting the investigation anymore?"

Better to know how the game played out than to be blindfolded from the board.

Dr Sherman turned her head from side to side, and her chestnut locks ruffled against the collar of her shirt. "I'm happy for you to continue communicating with Russell—" She fixed Elizabeth with a sharp look. "—though I'd prefer it if you'd obey the clinic rules from now on." Her expression softened again. "I just don't want you to lose sight of the main reason why you're here. And it isn't to catch who poisoned you, nor is it to persuade me to sign you off."

The thought tugged at Elizabeth like the anchor had against its rope, causing the boat to lurch the moment after it set off. She had come to the clinic to sleep and because she'd feared that the thoughts she was having would lead to her family getting hurt, and she'd stayed after the flashback and panic attack because she didn't want her memories and fears to rule her anymore. It was one thing to feel powerless because of the situation she found herself in with the assassin still on the loose and because she had no authority until she was signed off, but to allow herself to be ruled by elements of her own mind, elements that if she insisted upon leaving therapy now she'd have little chance of understanding let alone taking control of…?

Somewhere, the low _bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep_ of a panic alarm rang out.

Elizabeth paced around the end of the couch and lowered herself onto the cushions; her ribs let out a wail of protest as she stretched her arm back and guided herself down. She clutched her coffee cup in her lap, her fingertips pressing into the sides. "Last night…all the rain…it reminded me of when we were in the ambulance bay and I was watching Will on the backseat of the car."

"Would you like to talk about that?"

"No," she admitted, and then paused. She forced herself to take a deep breath—_to avoid the risk of infection_—though it lit her chest with a pain second only to that of childbirth. And then she forced herself to talk, to fend off an infection of a different kind, one that played out in her thoughts. "He wasn't breathing, just shaking, and there was nothing I could do to make it stop…"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**I'm struggling slightly to keep ahead of approving and proofreading chapters (part five is the longest by word count), but I'll do my best to maintain the pace. : )**


	66. Chapter Sixty-Four: a familiar scent

**Chapter Sixty-Four**

**…****a familiar scent.**

**Conrad**

**Friday, 7th December, 2018**

**9:09 AM**

The grass of the lawn outside sparkled in the crisp morning light, each blade dew-pearled and whitened with a rumour of frost. At once the world seemed frozen, encompassed in a stillness broken only by the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink….clonk…_ of the grandfather clock in the background, and yet constantly evolving as each day brought a touch more chill to the air and the fall blooms faded whilst the winter flowers blossomed. Conrad stood with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, and he stared out through the veil of the gauze curtain. In that moment of peace, he wished that time would stop, to give him a chance to savour that modicum of hush. But the longer the silence stretched, the more it felt like stagnation, and something deep inside him prickled with impatience for time to rush on. It was a churning of feelings he'd felt at times when danger loomed, like on the muggy nights when death lurked over the next ridge or beyond the clumps of elephant grass in Vietnam, a wanting to cling to all of life captured within a second, a wanting to thrust oneself into the hands of fate and to find release from the bonds of uncertainty, no matter what the outcome. Twice in the past few weeks he'd believed that he'd lost one of his oldest friends, more than twice he'd feared that he might lose her in a different sense, but for the moment, as far as he knew, she was safe, and he wanted to cling to that, yet in the same instant he yearned to fast forward to a time when they'd put this episode behind them and he need not worry anymore. He could only hope that when they reached that end, they would be greeted by a favourable outcome.

At the rattle of the handle and the grating rush of the door sweeping over the carpet, Conrad twisted around to face the office.

"Just had word from Moscow." Russell reached behind him and pushed the door shut. He strode towards the desk, his thumb darting over the keypad of his cell phone.

"And?" Conrad laid his hands on top of his office chair. His fingertips dented the leather.

Russell slipped his phone into his trouser pocket and lifted his gaze to meet Conrad's. "Apparently the Kremlin have raised their heads above the fog of paranoia for more than two seconds and they've decided they're willing to talk."

"What's there to talk about? Either they're going to help us or not."

"Or just shroud themselves in their usual denial." Russell rested his hands against his hips, his fingers splayed. "I wouldn't be surprised if they claimed that the shooter was Bulgarian too."

Conrad shook his head to himself, and then sank down into the seat. He shot Russell a look. "At what point does denial descend into delusion?"

"Perhaps you should ask Elizabeth that, the next time you see her."

Conrad drew his chin back, his eyebrows arched.

Russell tilted his head towards the door. "If you're ready, I'll set up the SVTC call."

* * *

Conrad rested his forearms against the desk, his hands clasped loosely together, and he steeled his gaze on the monitor screen set up opposite him. A moment later, the blue 'call connecting' screen flashed into the image of President Salnikov and Minister Avdonin sat side by side; a wall painted a red as jarring as spilt blood stretched behind them.

"President Salnikov." A thick drawl laboured Conrad's tone. "I'm glad that we finally have the opportunity to talk."

"Yes." President Salnikov's own accent gave each word a quality such that it sounded as though it had been pinched between thumb and forefinger before he nudged it off the tip of his tongue. "We received message from our ambassador in your country regarding the unfortunate incident with Secretary McCord—"

Stood to the right of the screen, Russell flung his hands out wide whilst his eyes bugged.

"Unfortunate?" Conrad's brow furrowed. "President Salnikov, one of your citizens shot my secretary of state in the chest three times, and as I'm sure Minister Avdonin has informed you, another one of your citizens poisoned her and her brother, leaving them both comatose."

Minister Avdonin's jaw tensed, whilst his fist clenched atop the armrest. It looked as though he were resisting the urge to bury his face in his hand.

Salnikov shifted in his seat. "Yes… Most unfortunate…"

Avdonin gripped the bridge of his nose, shook his head to himself, and then looked up to the ceiling as his hand fell back to his lap and a great puff of breath escaped him.

Salnikov continued. "But we were profoundly moved by Secretary McCord's commitment to ongoing relations between Russia and America. It heartened us to hear that she's eager to put this incident behind us, and we would like that too."

"While it pleases me to hear it," Conrad said, "this issue's far from resolved."

Salnikov's already brittle smile looked like it was about to crack. Avdonin leant in towards Salnikov, one hand masking his mouth, but Salnikov held up his hand, a stop sign that caused Avdonin to shrink away again. Salnikov kept his gaze fixed on the screen. "Yes. And, as such, Russia is prepared to offer its support in your investigation."

With one arm crossed over his chest, Russell rubbed at his chin and muttered, "Try to rein in the enthusiasm, won't you?"

Conrad resisted shooting him a sideways glance and instead kept his gaze steeled on Salnikov. "I'm glad to hear it, but an offer's only an offer. It's actions we're looking for, not words."

"Our authorities have begun some preliminary inquiries—" Salnikov said.

"You mean detain and torture." Another mutter escaped Russell.

"—and if we were to learn of any information that might be of assistance to your investigation, we will of course share it with you."

'_Preliminary', 'if', 'might'… _Vague words for an even vaguer promise.

Conrad leant his weight forward into his arms. His stare sharpened. "I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the urgency of this matter. These men are highly dangerous…" Perhaps a vague allusion to the involvement of the GRU would get through to them. "…especially with the resources they have at their disposal."

Salnikov's mouth pinched, a slight flare to his nostrils. Half a second later, he smoothed away the look. Or at least he tried to. "Yes. Minister Avdonin informed me of Secretary McCord's concerns."

"Then you'll understand how it would look to us, and how we'd have to respond, if—despite your best intentions—you found yourself unable to help us with this issue, particularly given the fact that not twelve hours after our last request for assistance, Secretary McCord was shot by one of Minister Avdonin's security detail."

Salnikov's expression soured. This time when Avdonin ducked towards him, he didn't bat him away. Instead, he lowered his gaze to the desk, his grip on the armrests tightening, and he gave the occasional nod or a mutter of 'da' or 'nyet' whilst Avdonin murmured in his ear. After a minute or so, he held up his hand and signalled for Avdonin to stop. "Very well."

At Salnikov's nod, Avdonin addressed the screen. The deep bags beneath his eyes suggested that he too had suffered a few sleepless nights following the shooting. Though that was more likely due to the response in Moscow than out of concern for the woman he'd left to die on the track outside the clinic. "President Dalton, we assure you we are as appalled by these events as you are and we are committed to helping you resolve this issue—"

Conrad shook his head. Slowly. His gaze locked on Avdonin. "Minister Avdonin, when Elizabeth McCord reached out for your assistance, she trusted you. And you led her would-be murderer straight to her. Regardless of whether or not you knew of the shooter's intentions, you left her for dead and fled back to Moscow, so you'll have to forgive me if I find these offers and assurances of little comfort. There are people out there hell-bent on killing her. What I want is for you to take action and help us stop them. We need to know where Kostov is, and who else is assisting him, and we need you to take care of your own internal issues so that this doesn't happen again."

Avdonin's look darkened. "We can't give you information that we don't have—"

"Then I suggest you find the information, and fast."

"If you'd let me finish…"

Conrad arched his eyebrows at Avdonin, but kept to his silence.

"Thank you." Avdonin left a pause that emphasised the weight of the sarcasm held in his words. "What I was going to say, before you starting accusing me of leaving her for dead, is that we're willing to accept Secretary McCord's proposal for our deal over the BSR, on the condition that it's left open for review in the next administration. Given what Secretary McCord and I discussed and her insistence on sending a message, I'd hope that she at least will take it as a sign of our commitment to assisting your investigation."

Conrad glanced to Russell. What Elizabeth had discussed with Avdonin regarding the BSR, he didn't know, just that she shouldn't have been discussing it with him at all whilst she was on leave. Though, at least the Russians signing the agreement was an action of sorts, something more than words. And it was well past time that they put the deal to bed.

With one hand gripping his chin, the other arm still slung across his chest, Russell gave a curt nod. Then he tapped at his watch and motioned for Conrad to wrap up the call.

Conrad returned to the screen. "We appreciate your offer, and we'll take it into consideration. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you with any information you gather, whether you deem it relevant or not."

"Of course." Salnikov lips strained into a thin smile. He gave brisk nod and reached out to terminate the call. "President Dalton."

"President Salnikov."

The screen cut to blue.

Conrad swivelled his chair round to face Russell. "Is it just me, or would it be awfully convenient for them if she didn't live to see the next administration?"

Russell held his hands on his hips and raised his shoulders. "It's not paranoia if it's true."

"And what was she doing discussing that with them anyway?"

"Multi-tasking, apparently."

"Well…we'll see if they deliver the goods or not. In the meantime, where does our end of the investigation stand?"

Russell pushed up the sleeve of his suit jacket and stared down at his watch. "Director Doherty should be here any minute to brief you." He tugged the cuff back down. His tone dragged slightly as he spoke. "I hope you don't mind, but I agreed that we'd have a fly on the wall."

"Dare I ask?"

"Just some good old 'carrot and stick', sir."

* * *

"The shooter was Vadim Dudnik." Director Doherty pulled a sheet from the manila file with a crisp swish and laid it on the desk. With two fingers pinning down the upper edge, he pushed the picture towards Conrad. "While it would have been useful to question him, he was shot multiple times by Secretary McCord's detail and died before reaching the hospital."

Perched against the arm of the couch, Russell folded his arms across his chest. "Well, I guess we'll forgive them for that, seeing as how they were trying to save her life and all."

"He had no devices on him," Doherty continued, "and any that he was travelling with would have gone with Minister Avdonin and his security detail back to Moscow."

Conrad's lips tugged into a firm line, and he raised his eyebrows. "Something President Salnikov and Minister Avdonin failed to mention."

"What about the hotel where they were staying?" Russell asked.

Doherty twisted around, and shook his head. "Nothing there either." He returned to Conrad. "We suspect that he was using a burner phone while in the US. Maybe he left it in his luggage, but it's just as likely that he disposed of it before leaving for Moscow."

"Well, let's hope it's the latter," Conrad said, "otherwise it rather puts the lie to their claim that they'll help us with the investigation."

"What about his movements in the US?" Russell asked.

Doherty pivoted back and forth between Conrad and Russell. "We've been able to track most of his movements, given that he was travelling with Minister Avdonin. There was nothing suspicious, except—" He dragged another photograph out of the file and placed it on the desk. It was a grainy CCTV image of Dudnik and another man seated on a pair of plush armchairs, a leather-topped drinks table crouched between them. "—not long after Minister Avdonin spoke to Secretary McCord's staff at State, CCTV shows Dudnik meeting with this man in the foyer of the hotel."

Russell pushed himself away from the arm of the couch and joined Doherty in front of the desk. He scowled down at the image, and then up at Doherty. "And do we know who he is?"

"Nikolay Volkov," Doherty said. "An attaché at the Russian embassy, and according to the IC, ex-GRU."

The clench in Conrad's jaw tightened. "Do we know what they discussed?"

Doherty shook his head. "There was no audio, and they were turned away from the camera for most of the meeting, so lip-readers were unable to determine what they were saying."

"And of course—" Russell's voice held all the deflation of a sigh. "—being an attaché means that he has diplomatic immunity, so we can hardly drag him in for questioning, even if we had probable cause, which means our lead turns out to be just another dead end."

"Not exactly." Doherty's gaze darted back and forth between Conrad and Russell.

Conrad sank back in his seat. He rested his face in the cradle between forefinger and thumb, his elbow propped against the armrest. He waited.

Doherty continued. "Volkov came forward and submitted himself for voluntary questioning."

Russell frowned. "Why the hell would he do that?"

"He said that he heard about the shooting from the ambassador and he felt it important to disclose that he and Dudnik had met that evening. He claims that he's an old friend of Dudnik's father and that they were just catching up before Dudnik returned to Moscow."

"What?" Russell drew his chin back. "And they chose to leave this little catch up until the moment Dudnik's meant to be catching a flight?"

"We agree, it doesn't sound right, and our agents who interviewed him felt that his answers were all too contrived and rehearsed, but we have nothing on him." Doherty shrugged. "And as you said, he has diplomatic immunity, which precludes any kind of search."

Russell paused for a long moment. He rubbed his chin, his eyes clouded with thought. Then he looked to Conrad. "We could always pass the information on to the Russians, see if they make good on their offer or not."

Conrad shook his head. He leant forward and rested his arms atop the desk. "I'd rather we have something more concrete first, something they can't just ignore or explain away with another convenient excuse."

"I've been liaising with Director Ware," Doherty said, "and the IC are currently investigating any links between Dudnik, Volkov and the group, as well as the GRU officers our agents in country have already identified as having met with the group. But it'll take time."

"And time's not something we have, not when Kostov's still at large and there could be God knows how many others already in the US." Conrad pushed the images across the desk towards Doherty. The sunlight that filtered in through the windows behind shimmered off their glossy surface. "Keep me informed of any developments, and keep the pressure on. This is the number one priority for both the IC and the bureau."

Doherty stuffed the images back into the file. "Yes, sir. Thank you, Mister President."

Whilst Doherty strode away towards the door, Russell took a seat in the chair next to the desk. He leant back, one leg slung over the other, smoothed down his tie and then examined its end, as though he were studying microscopic pieces of lint that clung to the navy fabric. Only when the door had clunked into its frame, a slight rattle jarring through the wall, did he speak, his tone a touch more elevated than before. "Well done for keeping your mouth shut. That must be some kind of record."

"Cute, Russell." Elizabeth's voice cut through the speaker of the desk phone. "I'd laugh, if it weren't for the bruised ribs and all. Oh, and the fact that even you can do better than that."

Conrad raised his eyebrows at Russell, and fought back the smirk that threatened his lips.

"Don't bite the hand that feeds you." Russell's voice held a sing-song lilt, the same tone used to chide a preschooler.

Before it could descend into the two of them thrusting ripostes back and forth—or worse: dissolve into playground insults—Conrad leant his weight into his arms where they rested atop the desk, his fingers loosely interlaced in front of him. "I'm sorry it's not better news, Bess."

"Well," she said, "while I'd love nothing more than to hear that we've caught Kostov and the whole thing's over, I don't think it's all bad."

"What conversation were you listening to?" Russell muttered and shot the phone a look.

Either Elizabeth didn't hear him, or more likely, she chose to ignore him. "I wouldn't be surprised if this group had a contact in the US, and someone in Volkov's position would certainly be ideal."

"Just because he suits the role doesn't mean that he's involved," Russell said, "even if the FBI think the guy doth protest too much."

"But it's worth looking into."

"Did you not hear the part about diplomatic immunity?"

"Sure. And I agree, there's not much _we_ can do to look into him…"

Conrad arched his eyebrows. _Here it comes_. "Let me guess… You know a guy."

"Anton Durchenko," Elizabeth said. "He works as a cultural attaché at the Russian embassy."

Russell's eyes widened. He leant back in the chair and held his hands out to the sides—a silent equivalent of: _Is she completely and utterly insane?_

"And you can tell Russell to stop giving me that 'crazy woman' look."

The look twisted into a flash of shock before Russell had a chance to smother it. Then he glowered at the phone, though the annoyance was stained with a touch of suspicion, as though he were half wary he might find a hidden camera lurking inside.

"And if you don't want me to read you over the phone, perhaps you should try being a little less predictable."

Conrad suppressed a chuckle. That was Bess. As sharp as ever. The thought struck him like a familiar scent; a silent lilt that could deliver you through space and time back to a specific moment, drenched in a feeling so unique that it eluded capture. She was getting better.

"Anyway, back to Durchenko," she said. "We need to ask him what he knows about Volkov, any meetings or unusual activity in the last few months. See if he can keep an eye on Volkov too. If he is communicating with Kostov, it could give us a lead."

Russell tapped his hand against the desk, his fingers arched. "But how do you expect us to get Durchenko to spy on his own colleague? If the Kremlin found out what he was doing—"

"Just set up a meeting with him, read him in and ask him to help. When he refuses, tell him he owes me a favour. When he says that I'm out of favours, remind him of Tbilisi."

Russell frowned. His shoulders gave a kind of shimmy, as though the question shivered its way out. "What about Tbilisi?"

"Just 'Tbilisi' will be enough."

"Is there something we ought to know about?"

"Just that it'll work."

The muffled sound of someone else's voice murmured down the line, followed by Elizabeth's at a slight distance as though she had ducked the receiver away from her mouth and pressed it to the dip beneath her collarbone.

A few seconds later, her voice came back clear again. "I've got to go. Apparently my time's up, and I'm being summoned to some kind of circle time. I swear I'll never complain about an NSC meeting again."

Conrad allowed himself a smile. "I'll hold you to that. Take care, Bess."

"Goodbye, sir. Russell."

There came a clunk, and the line cut out.

Conrad rocked back in his seat. He drummed his fingers against the armrest, and tilted his head towards the phone as his gaze met Russell's. "She sounds like she's doing well."

"She's scheming." Russell flapped his hand towards the phone. "What did you expect?"

Conrad shook his head. "It's not just that. I've seen her in bad spots before, and it's like the light inside her's dimmed. When we visited the other week, it felt like maybe it'd gone out altogether…" The desperation in her eyes when she had looked up at him and said, _Conrad, I need this_, stained his vision. His lips tugged to the side, as if to shrug it off. "Or perhaps that's just knowing what came after. But now… I don't know. Perhaps all our perceptions are skewed by what we want and what we fear, but she sounds different, like she's getting better."

"She'll be wreaking havoc at State again in no time." Russell braced himself against the arms of the chair and pushed himself up to standing. But then he paused. He gave a slight shrug that belied the concern in his eyes. "Provided it's not third time lucky, of course."

Silence smothered the room, thick with the implication.

Russell's gaze dipped away—the look both acknowledged that what he'd said was true, and that he wished he hadn't said it. He tilted his head towards the door. "I'll contact Durchenko."

Conrad watched Russell in silence as he strode away, the hunch in his shoulders a touch more pronounced than usual, and then when the door had thudded shut, he eased his chair around to face the lawn beyond the haze of the net curtains. The tinge of frost had already started to give way, and it left the grass almost drab in comparison. The sparkle lost.

Both with his brother and with Harrison, he'd seen that 'better' was something confined to a single moment. Sometimes those moments could be strung together long enough to make one believe that such a state was permanent. But perhaps that was the denial most dangerous of all—the refusal to accept that nothing in life was permanent. Health, mental or otherwise. The things we own. The people around us. A denial designed to protect us. A denial that also robbed us. How different life would be if everyone were to embrace the knowledge that everything could change in an instant. Would it be richer, or would its meaning be lost in the transience?

For now at least, he clung to the spark in Elizabeth's voice and the belief that she would string together a lifetime full of 'betters', and he tried his best to ignore the voice inside that told him if there were to be another attempt, if the Russians failed to keep their promise, or if that promise were just a facade, the string that strung those pearls of 'betters' together could be cut.

Because if that happened, it would be more than just one life that fell apart.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**And thank you for all your comments/reviews!**


	67. Chapter Sixty-Five: exposure

**Note:** Just for reference, the flashback scene is set after Jay and Kat's visit in Chapter Twenty-Two '…beneath the patio.'.

* * *

**Chapter Sixty-Five**

**…****exposure.**

**Henry**

**Monday, 10th December, 2018**

**8:12 AM**

_"__And in other news, we're expecting to hear more today from the State Department regarding the deal that has been reached over the future governance of the Bering Strait Region. We understand that this is the deal Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord was working on prior to her taking personal leave following an illness in the family…"_

At the sound of her name, Henry stopped fiddling with the clasp of his watch and looked up from his seat on the bench at the end of their bed. His gaze fixed on the television screen. The voice of the news anchor had been no more than a drone in the background, as dull as the grey light that pressed in from outside, but Elizabeth's name stood out as stark as the single English word in a Cantonese monologue. Arresting in its familiarity.

It had always been that way, whether it be latching on to her name whispered between guests at a cocktail party; or spotting her smile light up across the throng of some State function, followed by the eye-roll she'd give him when he locked on her gaze; or the jolt of her scent, back when she'd favoured black rose and ylang-ylang, that promised him he'd find her somewhere amidst the stacks at UVA. A sixth sense of sorts, dedicated to homing in on all that was her. Though that sense had sharpened recently, honed both by worry that someone would find out where she was staying and go straight to the press with the story and by a thirst to hear anything about her, as though somehow a newsreader might be able to tell him whether or not she was okay.

"Hey." Stevie leant in the doorway. Her cerulean nail varnish brought a pop of colour to the white frame, as striking as a jay's feathers. "Blake's downstairs. Matt too."

"Did they say why?" The links of Henry's watch chinked as he fumbled with the fastening.

Her shoulders flinched. "Something about some files State need."

"I'll be right there." He stooped down, pulled on his shoes, and then tugged the laces tight.

Stevie continued to hover at the edge of his vision, her fingers still curled around the frame. When he eased to his feet and paced towards the chaise longue, her gaze followed him like a nudge at the back of his neck. "Have you heard from her at all?"

His shoulders tensed, and he froze for a fraction of a second. Then he grabbed the remote control from where it perched atop the stack of books on the accent table between the seat and the shelves behind. The screen whined when he zapped it to black, and the silence that followed ached—a reminder of what had led him to switching on the television in the first place. The morning news was Elizabeth's routine, something he'd happily live without; but without her there, it had become his routine, something to numb him to the hush hollowed out by her absence, a hush that expanded in breadth and depth hour by hour, day by day.

"Dad?" Stevie's brow pinched and her mouth twisted as she chewed on the inside of her bottom lip. A ripple of light cast off from her nail varnish as her fingers flexed against the frame.

He met her with a forced smile. No more than a taut line. "No. Not yet."

_Not in twenty-nine days._

He placed the remote control down on the shelf, and its plastic case clattered against the wood. "Can you let them know I'll be down in a minute?"

"Sure." She gave a quick nod and then ducked into the hall.

"And, Stevie…?" He waited for her to reverse a step, so that she stood at the edge of the doorway, her forearm braced against the frame. He took a breath that lodged high in his chest, rubbed his brow, and then let his hand fall empty at his side. "I know you wanted her to be here…but did you want to do anything on Thursday?"

She opened her mouth and froze like that for an endless second whilst her gaze sailed beyond the shelves. Then she shook her head and the words escaped in a rushed sigh. "I don't know." With the tip of her middle finger, she nudged her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I was going to meet up with someone, but the Secret Service guys are a bit of a buzz kill, so…" She trailed off into a shrug.

"Well, the offer's there."

She gave a tug of a smile. "Thanks, pop." Then she tilted her head along the corridor. "Well, I'd better…" She paused for a moment longer, just enough to ease them both back into that silence and to see her smile dim, and then she padded away.

Whilst the soft _thump-thump-thump_ of her feet against the floorboards faded towards the stairs, Henry's gaze lingered on the doorway. It wasn't just Elizabeth that this mental struggle had claimed; it had robbed the house of a certain lightness, as though each passing fear—spoken or otherwise—spiralled up like a wisp of smoke to thicken the air and hang in a perpetual smog beneath the ceiling, and it had stolen those moments of ease that had buoyed the relationships within their family, so that at all times there was an undertow of strain.

Especially so when it came to Stevie.

He'd like to say it was solely because he didn't know where on the spectrum from resenting Elizabeth to missing her he'd find Stevie each day, and so it felt as though one misplaced word could be as perilous as an ill-timed manoeuvre whilst pulling six Gs in a fighter plane. At least that would render him as innocent as any other father, defenceless to his daughter's mood swings. Then the blame for the strain between them would lie with the situation itself and with the way that Stevie had reacted to it, as understandable as that reaction might be. But perhaps in truth, much of the tension between them stemmed from his own unease, his reluctance to admit that she hadn't been wrong when she'd said that he should have seen just how much Elizabeth was struggling.

_'__You can't force someone to talk when they're not ready.'_

And sometimes you can't make someone hear what they don't want to hear either.

* * *

**Monday, 5th November, 2018**

**11:56 PM**

Shadows hung thick across the landing, softened only by the glimpses of yellow from the street lamps that snuck in through the slats of the blinds. Henry pressed the heel of his palm to one eye, then the other, and then blinked hard as he stumbled towards the top of the stairs. His fingers groped along the banister; they both guided him and steadied him as he lumbered down step by step towards the screech of brakes and the revving of engines that blared from the television in the lounge.

Flashes of light bounced off the walls and flooded the room with an off-white glow, the kind that made the surrounding gloom all that much darker, something that lurked in wait for the chance to seize hold once more. He staggered the last few paces over to the couch, rounded the end and slumped down onto the seat next to Elizabeth. His whole body sagged like the cushion beneath him, as though dragging himself from bed and hauling himself downstairs to join her had drained him of the last of his energy.

Hunched forward, with her gaze glued to the screen and her thumbs flicking over the joysticks of the game controller, Elizabeth didn't so much as acknowledge him. In the pale light, her skin seemed almost translucent. No—_she_ seemed translucent, as though if he were to reach out and touch her, his fingers would slip straight through her. The more he thought about it, the more his fingers itched to try it, to prove that she was real, that she was more than just a ghost sat beside him. But if he did that and she flinched away again and withdrew further behind the walls that currently surrounded her, he would wish he had settled for just watching her, for this moment of closeness, however tentative it might be, more fragile than a wisp of gossamer.

So he watched her, whilst she stared transfixed at the screen. The flashes of light lit up the whites of her eyes and they darkened the shadows beneath them. The buzz of the engines hummed through the room, punctuated by the arrhythmic beeps of horns and the synthesised crunch of metal on metal as the cars collided with one another. It was the same game he had played with Jason just hours before Elizabeth confessed she wanted to run for president, the same game they had played at the arcade just minutes before they learnt they were careening towards nuclear annihilation. _I'm with you._ That's what he'd told her. Whether it was planning their future or facing their lives ending in the present. _I'm with you_. He wished he could tell her that the same still held true now, that no matter what came in the seconds, minutes, hours, days after the game ended this time: _I'm with you_. But it felt like whatever he said, it wouldn't be enough, and given all her pain and anger and the way she'd distanced herself recently, he daren't risk provoking her.

"I looked at that file Jay and Kat brought over." Elizabeth's voice was flat, almost buried beneath the drone from the television. She continued to stare at the screen whilst she tapped the buttons and fumbled the joystick on the controller.

"Oh?" _So she _had_ noticed him_.

"Couldn't concentrate on it though." She settled back and rested her head against the grey woollen blanket draped over the cushions. The change in position forced her to peer down her nose to keep her gaze fixed on the screen.

Henry twisted around. He laid his arm along the back of the couch, his fingertips almost close enough to stroke the soft strands of hair that fanned across the blanket. "Did you get any sleep?"

She gave what might have been a nod. "A little."

A little wasn't enough, and it couldn't have added up to much more than an hour, but he didn't want to push her. Not again. "Maybe try going through it in the morning."

Silence spun out between them, thickened by the squeal of brakes and the growl of engines.

It felt like hours, not minutes, had passed when she gave another nod and muttered, "Maybe."

They sank back into that nothingness. Him watching her, her watching the screen. With each second that passed, it felt as though the distance between them gaped, as though the cushions they sat on were two different tectonic plates, touching for a time, but now drifting further and further apart. And it ached.

"Elizabeth…" He tangled his fingers through the ends of her hair.

She froze. Her thumbs stilled against the controller. Seconds yawned into a breathless minute. Then she rolled her head to the side so that she faced him. When her gaze locked on his, her eyes were full of shadows. So deep he could drown in them. She studied him. Her gaze flitted back and forth as though fine print were etched into each line of his expression. Then she blinked, and for a moment, that spark that held her soul chased the shadows away again.

Without a word, she eased across the fault line between their cushions and nestled against him, her head to his chest. She took a deep breath that ruffled through her, and in waves, her soft warmth rippled through him. He gathered her closer still, and as he kissed the top of her head, his eyes slipped shut and he breathed her in. In that moment he knew there was nothing he wouldn't give to keep her there with him.

"I'm sorry about earlier." Her voice was no more than a whisper and muffled by his tee.

He shook his head and rubbed her arm through the sleeve of her sweatshirt. "You're hurting."

"So are you."

His hand stilled, and in the pause that followed, she craned her neck to look up at him. The chorus of car horns faded into the background, whilst for an endless second, she held his gaze. Then the shadows flooded back in and her look held the words that she didn't say: _Because of me_.

Before he could say anything, she gave a slight shake of the head and turned away again, her attention once more settling on the screen. She stayed close though, and he clung to that, clung to her. What she said both through words and a look might have been true: he was hurting. Though not because of her—not really—but because she was hurting. And he only hoped that his own words and gestures would remind her that no matter what: _I'm with you_.

The car looped around and around the track—the only measure of time passing. Elizabeth remained nestled against him whilst she fumbled over the buttons of the controller. Each time he caressed her arm or stroked her hair or pressed a kiss to the top of her head, she tensed for half a moment before relaxing again, but she didn't protest or pull away. He clung to that too, even if part of him felt that she was choosing rather than wanting to be close to him. For now, they were tiptoeing around one another, every word and action carefully placed. It created a different distance of sorts, an emotional chasm. But in letting him hold her, it felt as though she were trying. Better that than having her remind him that the list of all the things she needed right now didn't feature him.

The car crashed through the barrier at the edge of the track. It flipped and then rolled again and again and again. Elizabeth's whole body tensed as 'Game Over' flashed up in red across the screen. A pause. Then— "I can't do this, Henry."

He studied her for a moment, and then with his arms wrapped around her, he took the controller from her, and shifted to sit behind her so that he could hold her properly. The warmth of her back pressed against his chest through the thin cotton of his tee, and his lips were almost close enough to graze the curve of her ear as he murmured, "Sure you can. Here. Like this—"

He navigated to 'Play Again'.

* * *

**Present Day**

**8:22 AM**

Henry turned his gaze away from the corridor outside their bedroom and towards the doorway to the walkthrough closet. There he found the trace of Elizabeth huddled in a ball, her t-shirt stretched over her knees, the moonlight glistening off her tear-stained cheeks. _I don't deserve to be here_. He could still see the look in her eyes, the raw truth that had revealed what '_I should be dead_' really meant. At the time it had felt like a failure; despite believing that he knew her—and even taking pride in her claims that sometimes he knew her better than she knew herself—he had failed to realise just how much she was suffering. In the weeks since, that sense of failure had deepened. What if she'd been willing to talk before? What if she'd been trying to reach out? He could have helped her. If only he'd heard what she was saying.

Henry picked up his woollen blazer from the bench at the end of their bed, shrugged it on, and then made his way downstairs. Low chatter, punctuated with the occasional chuckle of laughter, drifted up the staircase to greet him, but the conversation lulled into silence as he strode down the last few steps into the living room that adjoined the entrance hall.

Matt and Blake were waiting by the console table just inside the front door. The grey gloom from outside seeped in through the net curtains that stretched across the door behind them, but the white light of the wall sconces fended it off and gave the house a semblance of warmth.

"Hey, guys." Henry offered them a smile as he strode towards them.

"Dr McCord." Blake straightened up a little. "Good morning."

"Hey, Doc." The fronts of Matt's overcoat flapped as his hands moved in his pockets.

"Stevie said you were looking for some files?" Henry's gaze darted between them.

Matt hiked his thumb towards Blake. "He is." Then he gave a half-shrug. "I'm just looking for an excuse to miss the morning meeting."

"Yes," Blake said. "And I'm sorry to just drop by like this. I tried calling your cell—"

Henry raised one hand. "New number. And it's no problem. Really." He tilted his head towards the study and beckoned them to follow as he slid the doors aside with a trundling squeak and then stepped inside. "I think all the files are still in here—" He motioned to the stack of manila folders at the corner of Elizabeth's desk. "—though Elizabeth does sometimes take them up for bedtime reading, so if there's anything missing, just let me know."

Matt raised his eyebrows. "Reports into corruption in East Africa…? Sounds soothing."

Henry perched against the edge of his desk. With his arms folded across his chest, he shrugged, and the corners of his lips turned downwards in sync. "Beats the CIA briefs she used to bring home. And at least these don't come with her assurance that, if I happen to see anything, she'd have no choice but to kill me."

Matt grinned, but his smile swiftly faltered as Blake snapped the cover shut on the top file, turned around and slapped it to Matt's chest—"Here. Hold this."—before he returned to the second folder in the stack. He prised back the cover, and dragged his finger down the text of the first page.

Henry let his gaze linger on Blake for a moment. There was a certain ruthlessness to his efficiency; probably just one of the many reasons why Elizabeth had hired him. Then he turned to Matt, and eased back into his smile, though it strained a touch more than before. "I heard the news about the BSR deal. I know Elizabeth will be pleased."

"Well, it was all down to her." Blake's voice came as though from a distance whilst he frowned at the page.

Modesty. Another trait Elizabeth appreciated. But she also liked to give credit where credit was due. Henry shook his head, and his gaze lowered to the geometric pattern of the carpet beneath them. "I know you've had to pick up a lot of slack while she's been on leave, and I appreciate—"

"No, really." Blake thrust the second file in Matt's direction. "If it weren't for her talking to Minister Avdonin, we'd probably still be in a deadlock."

Matt nodded, and then nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose, whilst the files rested in the sling formed by the fingers of his opposite hand. "Or Cushing would have gutted the deal." He shot Blake a glance. "I hope he doesn't think he can take all the credit, by the way."

Stooped over the files, Blake snorted. "Now there's someone who wouldn't miss a dinner party, let alone take a bullet in the name of diplomacy."

The frown that gripped Henry's brow grew deeper and deeper by the millisecond, whilst the pit of his stomach churned with an all too familiar sinking feeling. Most of their words flew past him, his mind still stuck on that first phrase. "Elizabeth called Minister Avdonin about the BSR deal?" His gaze flitted from Matt to Blake and back again. "While she's off work? On compulsory medical leave?"

Blake straightened up, turned to Henry, and shook his head. "No."

A wave of relief swept through Henry, only for—

"She met with him in person," Matt said.

The sinking feeling engulfed him again, twice as strong as before.

"And technically it was about the investigation," Blake said.

Henry's eyebrows knitted together. "The investigation?"

"Into the poisoning," Matt said.

"And stopping war with Russia," Blake added.

Henry massaged his brow, but rather than the tension in the furrows easing, it grew more and more entrenched. Elizabeth was meant to be getting treatment to stop her from developing depression and PTSD, she was meant to be focusing on herself and her mental health, she was meant to be working on coming back to him and their family.

His hand fell back to his side, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of the desk. "I'm sorry—" The words came sharp and bitter-tinged. "—but what does Minister Avdonin have to do with the poisoning, and why was my wife meeting with him or trying to stop war with Russia when she's meant to be focusing on her recovery?"

Blake looked to Matt and then back to Henry. "Russell Jackson didn't tell you?"

Henry's jaw clenched. _Russell. Of course it was Russell._ "Russell didn't tell me what?"

A smile dappled Matt's lips. "It's a long story."

But at Henry's look, the smile dwindled. "Then I think you've just found the perfect excuse to miss your morning meeting." He motioned to the armchair in the corner. "Have a seat."

* * *

**Elizabeth**

**9:12 AM**

The soles of Elizabeth's sneakers slapped against the linoleum as she stepped off the bottom of the staircase and strode towards the door that led into reception. But before she could reach it, the door wrenched open with a rasp and a whoosh, and the yellow light spilled into the corridor.

Stood on the other side, Amy startled. Her eyes blinked wide beneath the thick frames of her glasses. "Elizabeth—" The name came out in a rush of breath. "I was just coming to find you."

Elizabeth shook her head, one hand raised to pause that thought. "I know, I was meant to be down at nine." She paced through the doorway and twisted to face Amy whilst Amy pressed her back to the wood, her hands folded behind her as she held the door open. "I got sidetracked, but it was therapy related, I promise."

Amy gave a quick shake of the head, and the dark chestnut fronds of her crop whipped across her brow. "It's not that."

Elizabeth stopped. "Oh?"

"There's someone here to see you."

Elizabeth peered around the reception area, but the rows of chairs interspersed with an odd slouch-cushioned sofa here and there were just as vacant as they had been when she'd come down to breakfast earlier that morning. The only sign of life was her DS agent, Jimmy, who stood guard just to the right of the inside set of glass doors, his gaze fixed firmly ahead, his hands loose yet poised at his sides, a gunslinger always at the ready.

Elizabeth turned back to Amy. "Where exactly?"

"He's waiting outside." Amy tilted her head towards the doors, and then nudged her glasses up the bridge of her nose using the middle joint of her forefinger. "We told him he could come in, but he said he'd wait and join you for your exposure session."

"I see." Elizabeth's eyes narrowed on Amy. She studied the tinge of crimson that crept into Amy's cheeks upon saying the word 'exposure' and the way that she averted her gaze. "And, by any chance, did this someone happen to make a lewd joke about said exposure session?"

The crimson deepened and spread until it suffused all of Amy's neck and cheeks. "Possibly."

Elizabeth clutched her hips whilst her gaze sailed away through the sheets of glass and towards the grey gloom that hung over the car park and that made the monotony of gravel all the more dreary. She clicked her tongue against her palate. _Mike B. _"Great."

Jimmy cleared his throat. The widening of his eyes and his slight hesitation said that he didn't want to speak out of turn, but when Elizabeth's gaze darted to him, he offered anyway, "Ma'am, if you'd prefer, we can remove him from the premises."

Elizabeth gave a slight shake of the head, her hands still rested against her hips. "Well, I think everyone would prefer that." Then she forced a smile. "But it's all right, Jimmy." She nodded towards the keypad next to the door, nudging Amy forward. "Let's get this over with, shall we?"

* * *

The chill in the air snuck through the loose weave of Elizabeth's cardigan, crawled across her skin, and elicited a prickle of gooseflesh. Careful not to press on her bruises, she clutched the fronts of the cardigan together as she scrunched through the semi-sodden gravel towards the black SUV that waited at the edge of the grassy island in the centre of the car park. The smell of damp released with each step rose up from the ground and mingled with the trace of coal smoke that thickened the air, but it no longer carried her away with it. Maybe it would though, if she were to let herself dwell on it.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, she had plenty of other things to dwell upon. Like Mike B. Leant against the door of the SUV. His arms folded across his chest. His lips spread into a grin that told her by the time the session was finished, she'd have a whole host of new entries on her list of reasons why she needed to meditate. "Well, look who they let out of the asylum."

Elizabeth bit down on the inside of her cheek. _Rise above it_. "Hey, Mike. Where's Gordon?"

"Daycare." He shrugged. "I thought about saying he was a therapy dog, but it's long drive, I just had my car detailed, and dog hair's a nightmare on the upholstery."

"You could've stayed in DC." She came to a stop a couple of strides away. The sound of Amy's footfall fell silent behind her. "Saved us all the trouble."

"Russell said you could use the company. Keep you focused."

"I'm surprised he even told you where I was staying."

"He thought it best to warn me that you might get in touch and try and wrangle yourself out of a psych hold, and to insist that under no circumstance was I to represent you."

Elizabeth's gaze drifted away, towards the reflection of the black walnut tree that danced across the car bonnet. "Wow… He really did think of everything."

"Of course he did." Mike wrinkled his nose. "Always protect your investments." He motioned to her t-shirt. His gaze settled south of the neckline. "Now. Are you going to show me the damage?"

"Not that kind of exposure, Mike."

"Come on. It's not like I haven't seen it all before."

Elizabeth drew her chin back. "Excuse me?"

Mike's eyes widened. "You're the one who insists on wearing see-through blouses."

"What's wrong with my blouses?" She folded her arms across her chest and earnt herself a dull ache that seeped through her ribs.

"Nothing. At least, not according to sixty-one per cent of the electorate."

"You ran a poll on my blouses?"

"Of course." He gave her a look as though to say that were the completely natural thing to do, and to think otherwise was just plain stupid. "You really think the White House would let you dress like that if it wasn't boosting your approval rating? A solid seventeen per cent of those questioned said you should go without the blouse altogether." He cocked his head whilst a glimmer that was all trouble lit his eyes and a smirk twisted his lips. "Now, as for the six per cent—"

She flapped him towards the backdoor of the SUV before the conversation could descend any further into what promised to be murky depths. "Just get in the car, Mike."

Whilst Elizabeth sat in the same seat she'd taken the day of the poisoning and Mike took the seat where Will had sat, Amy remained outside in the car park, her navy blue puffer jacket huddled around her. Whether she was giving them space to talk or just avoiding being around Mike, Elizabeth couldn't be sure, but at least it meant she wouldn't have someone checking in with how she was feeling on a scale from Xanaxed to rocking in the foetal position every ten seconds.

After two-and-a-half minutes of silence, Mike stopped drumming his fingers against the door panel and twisted to face Elizabeth. "Well, this is boring."

Elizabeth continued to stare out of the window, her temple rested to its cold bite whilst her breath misted faint plumes across the glass. "That's the point."

"How can getting bored sitting in a car be the point?"

She shook her head, and then shot him a look. "There are worse things to feel than boredom."

The way his brow gathered in a frown said she might as well have been speaking Arabic for all the sense that made to him, and a pang of annoyance struck her before she had time to smother it. Not sparked by him or his lack of understanding per se, but by the fact that life had delivered her situations that meant she had no choice but to understand. Perhaps she ought to feel glad for him. After all, to be able to sit in silence and feel nothing but boredom…? That was a luxury. One she'd wish upon anyone, surely. But she couldn't deny that bitter tug from something deep inside, like the tangle of rope snaring a diver's ankle and stopping him from reaching the light at the surface, a tug that reminded her: yes, it was a luxury, but a luxury she'd lost decades ago. And the truth…? Maybe she envied him a little bit.

She turned away again. A crow fluttered down from the split-rail fence that curved around the edge of the car park. It hopped across the gravel, and then stopped to peck amidst the stones. Boredom might be out of her grasp, but to be able to sit in the car and not have her thoughts as dark and flustered as a murder of crows…? At least she could be grateful for that.

Mike's gaze remained hot on her cheek. "How long do we have to do this for?"

"You're free to go whenever you like. Me? Forty-five minutes."

"And do we have to sit in silence?"

A slight shake of the head. "Nothing wrong with silence, Mike."

"It feels like I'm haemorrhaging time."

She turned and arched an eyebrow at him. "Funny. Because whenever I'm around you, it feels like I'm haemorrhaging cash."

Mike's eyes took on a faraway sheen whilst he stared out beyond the windshield. Rays of realisation dawned across his face. "Perhaps that's the problem. Perhaps I need to bill you for the visit. Plus travel expenses. And maybe I _should_ have brought Gordon, then I could have charged you for the detail too."

She gave him an incredulous look. "Anything else you want to throw in while you're at it?"

"Well, my kitchen could do with replacing and my son's school fees are some kind of extortion, but I guess that's a bit of a stretch." He met her with an easy smile, one that said if he thought he could get away with it, he wouldn't be morally opposed to it.

The frown that gripped her brow tightened. She studied him for a moment, whilst through the window behind him the lowest boughs of the black walnut tree lurched in the breeze, like a churning of suspicion. Then— "Why are you really here, Mike?"

"Geez." Mike drew back—a hurt that went no deeper than the lines of his expression. "Are you this tetchy with Russell when he visits?"

"Russell brings me news and cake. You, on the other hand, only show up when I'm about to be sued or you think you can get something out of it."

"That's a little cynical, even for you."

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Also happens to be true." Her gaze sharpened on him. "So, which one is it?"

He turned away, and his gaze landed between the front seats as he shook his head. "Well, I don't have any cake, and while I wouldn't put it past you getting sued while you're hidden in the hinterlands of Virginia, there are no lawsuits currently pending." He stilled and looked to her, a glint to his eyes. "I do have some news though, if you're in the mood for sharing."

The pause felt thicker with the bulletproof glass muffling the world around them. When he let it drag, Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at him—_I'm waiting._

Mike held his gaze locked on hers. "That deal you hashed together over the BSR has gone through. State are releasing the details as we speak."

"Really?" Elizabeth's eyebrows strained even higher. At the persistence of Mike's smile, she snatched her glasses off and shook her head to herself, her hair a tickle against her cheeks. "Wow. I mean, I hoped it would, but still…it was a long shot."

Mike's brow furrowed and he gestured towards her chest. "The Russian foreign minister's security detail used you as target practice, for Pete's sake. The very least they can do is sign a piece of paper. Really they ought to be buying you your very own pet polar bear or whale or whatever it is you're trying to save now."

"Seabirds, fish, mammals, plankton…the ecosystem in general." She breathed on the lenses of her glasses, rubbed them down with the front of her tee, and then examined them in the grey light.

"Whatever." Mike flapped aside her comment. "Back to the point. Dalton agreed to a clause saying that it'll be revisited in the next administration though, so you know what that means."

"That the Russians wanted a concession to lessen an ego bruised enough to rival my ribs."

"If you want this deal, and however many others you've cooked up, to stand a chance of lasting longer than this administration, you need to run in the next election."

She shoved her glasses back on and twisted around to stare at him. _He's got to be kidding_. But all trace of his smile had vanished, and as his gaze bored into her, the sincerity it held was foreign and unnerving. _He couldn't be serious… Could he?_

"Have you seen where we are right now?" She motioned to the clinic grounds.

Mike wrinkled his nose. "So, you went a little '_Girl, Interrupted_'. Lincoln had depression, LBJ probably had bipolar, Dalton used to wear bow ties to non-formal occasions." He counted off the examples on fingers and thumb. "And as for that '_brain tumour_'…"

"It wasn't a '_brain tumour_'—" She mimicked his air quotes. "It was an actual tumour. On his brain." Her eyes bugged, and with fingers splayed, she thrust her hand towards his head.

He drew his chin back, his eyebrows arched, a slight shake of the head. "Not according to some forums." When she shot him a look, his expression sobered again. "Look, the point is, meningi-made-up-tumour or not: he got treatment, they let him back into office. There's no reason why you taking a time out now should be any different."

"It's not the same. That was a physical illness, this is…this…" Her gaze dipped away, as though she might find the end of that sentence resting on the seat between them.

"Then forget about Dalton." He swept the example aside. "Stick with all those old, dead guys with their episodes of the black dog, the _folie circulaire_, and whatever else they never admitted to having. They served their terms no problem. In some cases the country might even have benefited from it. At least you've acknowledged you have a crazy streak and you've dealt with it."

"Dealing with it."

"You say po-tay-to, I say regular outpatient check-ups and a strict regimen of prescription anxiolytics." He paused for a moment. His gaze flitted over her as though preparing to catch even the hint of a flinch in her expression. "The only question is: Do you want it?"

She turned away, towards the chill that seeped through the glass, and she rounded her shoulder on him. That evening when she'd perched next to Henry on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she had felt so certain of it. Running for the presidency felt almost as instinctive as saying 'yes' half a second after Henry had confirmed the meaning behind 'Mar Me Elibet'; an instant when gut and mind and heart clicked, a moment when she knew not only that something was right, but that she wanted it and she allowed herself to want it. And to hear Henry's affirmation—_I'm with you_—made her feel like it wasn't only okay for her to want it, but that it might actually be possible. One day they'd sit side by side facing the National Mall, her hand ungloved so that she could relish the warmth of his touch as she laced her fingers through his, and he'd lean in, his breath a hot tingle against her cheek as he whispered—_I told you you could do this._—before she rose to give her inaugural address. For one night, that dream had lived. But as the had sun dawned the following morning, so did the reality of it. The race would be a hard slog, the presidency tougher still, and she'd be dragging her whole family into it. That niggle festered and twisted until wanting it became something selfish. Then came lunch with Will and all that had followed. All that could have been avoided had she not wanted it.

Crows sailed down one by one from the branches of the black walnut tree and landed next to where the first still pecked at the gravel. The dirt scuffed beneath their claws, and their wings flustered into fans as they beat each other back. Though their beaks yawned, their throaty _caw-caw-caws_ were lost to the bulletproof glass, their cries as redundant as her wishes. So much had changed since that night when dreams could be a reality, and despite what her heart still said, her gut and her mind told her that it no longer mattered whether or not she wanted it.

"Well?" Mike prompted.

"At one point, maybe. But now…?" She plucked a stray white thread from her jeans, examined it, and then let it fritter away to the carpet. "I don't know."

His tone lifted. "But you were considering it?"

"And then someone tried to kill me and my brother."

"From what I heard, your brother was just collateral damage."

She turned her chin to her shoulder and cut him a sharp look. "Well, that was certainly comforting when he was lying in hospital in a coma."

He flapped his hand. "He got over it. And you'll get over this."

She continued to stare at him, and her eyes narrowed slightly.

"You know, if you don't run, you'll just be giving your would-be assassins exactly what they wanted." He shrugged. "Not you in a box, granted, but your career in a box at least. I think they'd count that as mission accomplished."

Her voice strained as she shifted herself in the seat, moving slowly so as to avoid earning herself a simmering jolt through the ribs. "Well, there's still plenty of time for them to achieve their primary objective, especially while there's at least one of them still loose in the US."

"Shouldn't the FBI have wrapped that up by now? Those CSI guys solve a case in less than sixty minutes, and that's including ad breaks."

"It's complicated."

"What isn't?" The furrow in his brow deepened, and he thrust one hand towards her. "Yet here you are cracking the investigation, securing Russian cooperation, strong-arming Avdonin into persuading Salnikov to sign off on that save-the-planet deal, all while being detained in the back of beyond at some psych unit. Plus, you survived two assassination attempts. Now, if that doesn't scream 'President'…"

With her leg bent across the seat between them, she held up one hand, her fingers spread, a star to push back the barrage. "Okay. Either Russell tells you way, _way_ too much, or he needs to stop letting you stay unsupervised in his office."

"I'm serious." He fixed her with a firm stare. The whites of his eyes gleamed with something unsettlingly close to optimism. "Bess, you can do this."

She held his gaze for a moment longer, until she started to let herself think that maybe she could do it.

Then her chin dipped. She shook her head, her hair falling forward to veil her face, and she busied her fingers with plucking at the seam of her jeans that ran from the inside of her knee down to her ankle. "Even if I wanted to run, I couldn't."

"Why not?"

"Keeping all this hidden… It'd feel like I was lying to the public."

"So? In four words you just summed up politics."

"That's why I hate politics."

"Then don't lie."

"Omission is still deception."

"Well, I'd argue you on that one, but no, what I mean is, you should come out and talk about this."

Her head snapped up. "What?"

She waited for his laugh and a '_Just kidding_', maybe even a '_I really had you going there for a moment_' but it never came. Instead his expression remained just a sober as before. "Tell the public what you've been through and why you ended up at a clinic."

She drew back until her spine found the bite of the door panel behind her, and she turned her head from side to side. "Well, that's certainly not approved by Russell Jackson, and if you so much as suggested that to him, I think you'd find yourself joining me inside the clinic."

"Do you know what your biggest asset is?"

"If you say my breasts, I swear to God…"

He frowned, his nose wrinkled, a flash of hurt—_Do you really think as little of me as that?_ "Of course I wasn't going to say your breasts."

A pause. A twinge of remorse. Perhaps she'd misjudged—

"Those are your biggest assets, _plural_." He held his hand up and silenced her before she had time to recover from the mental whiplash, let alone formulate her protest. "No. You're relatable."

"And you think having a nervous breakdown—" She gestured towards the memory of herself still trapped between the glass doors of the clinic. "—makes me relatable?"

He shrugged—_Why not?_ "One in five Americans suffer with mental illness each year, and those are only the ones who talk about it. Maybe some people won't vote for you because of it, but most people have experience of it, if not directly then with friends and relatives."

"Even so." Her voice strained. _Why didn't he get it?_ "It doesn't mean that they want their president to be affected. People still see it as a weakness."

"Then you show them why they're wrong." He shifted to mirror her stance, one leg folded in front of him, his elbow propped against the top of the seat, next to the headrest. "Look, I didn't think people would buy into the whole sick orphan brother story, but the donors I've got lined up are loving it. Sure, people want their leader to be strong, but they also want him—or _her_—to be human. You don't get much more strong and human than someone who's been through something like this and has the balls to speak out about it."

"And what about my opponents and critics who'll do everything they can to exploit it?"

"Rise above it, while I turf the skeletons out of their closets."

"Like you did with Carlos Morejon?" Her eyebrows arched.

A smile twisted his lips. "I was wondering when you were going to thank me for that."

"You go to all that trouble to silence him, and then you say we should just release it."

His eyes widened in way that suggested she was the one who wasn't getting it. But he wasn't the one who'd be opening himself up to the public and the ridicule that went with it. "I'm saying do a carefully managed interview and give your side of the story. Put it out there before someone else gets hold of it and decides to do a Morejon and paint you as an alcoholic."

She turned away. On the other side of the windscreen, a brittle leaf skittered across the glass before becoming trapped in the corner of the wipers. She shook her head to herself and pulled the folds of her cardigan tighter around her. Her fingers plucked and fumbled at the wool. "What is it with people thinking I'm an alcoholic?"

"Well, you do like a drink."

She spun back to face him. "I haven't touched alcohol in over six weeks."

"Keeping track of your last drink? Gotta say, makes you sound like an alcoholic."

"I haven't had sex in over six weeks either, does that make me a sex addict?"

He smirked and opened his mouth, his tongue poised—

She held up one finger. "Don't even go there."

The last thing she needed was for him to remind her of the '09 incident.

His smirk grew as a blush threatened her cheeks.

She glared at him. "And stop thinking about it."

The smirk lingered though, even as he continued, "Look, you've already let the Russians in on your big secret. At some point this is going to come out. Russell will agree with me when I say you've got to get ahead of this."

"The media will make it seem like I'm constantly teetering on the edge of mental breakdown. One photo where I'm not smiling, and it'll be a sure sign I'm suicidal. One frown too many, and I can't take the stress."

"Then you keep going and keep showing them that you're not." He gave a stilted shrug, as though her concern were as inconsequential as fretting over whether to have regular or sweet potato fries with dinner. "They'll soon get tired of it."

"Really?" Her eyes bugged. "All your master plans and legal jujitsu, and you're telling me your strategy is 'they'll soon get tired of it'?"

"Russell already has a plan on how to spin it if this gets leaked. You can wallow in it all you want, but I say use it to your advantage."

_Advantage…? Advantage…?_ She stared at him, and as she did, a deep frown descended across her brow. When she spoke, her voice held more grit than the car park outside, and she had to fight to stop it from cracking. "Mental illness isn't an advantage, it's like running a race with an invisible deadweight around your neck and everyone wondering why you can't keep up or why you're barely moving yet still breaking a sweat. Meanwhile, while you're struggling over each breath, you have to watch everybody else breeze by and skip off into the sunset."

Mike studied her. The flitter to his gaze made it look as though every word she'd just said had been etched into her expression, and he was reading them over, considering them one by one, perhaps even gaining a little understanding in the process, hopefully realising why she couldn't possibly do this. Until—

He shrugged. "We'll have to work on your metaphors before the interview, but I guess that's a start."

"Mike." She shook her head. Slowly. "I'm not agreeing to this."

"I'm not saying you have to bare your soul tomorrow." He gave her a look as if to say even he wasn't that unreasonable. "But at some point. Preferably within a week or so of you coming back."

"I said I'm not doing it."

He braced himself, one hand against the seat in front, the other against his own headrest. "If you don't speak out now, you're just waiting for someone else to speak for you."

"Or just handing them a stick to beat me with."

"Do you know how huge it would be for someone of your standing to come out and talk about something like this?"

"Yeah, career-shatteringly huge."

"Or the making of a president. If it helps, then don't think about the politics."

She raked her fingers through her hair. "It's always about the politics."

"Just imagine all those regular people out there who're contemplating the meaninglessness of their mundane little lives and how hearing about your experience could inspire them to stop running the car in the garage."

Her fingers lodged in her roots, and she shot him a look, her eyes narrowing. "You know, empathy really isn't your strong suit."

"I know. I might have pushed it a bit there." He made a gesture as though to discard that last point. Then his gaze settled on her again. "But I stand by what I've said. Maybe in the past this would have been a political no-no, but right now, with the current climate, all my research tells me this is the way to go. The fact is, this has happened, and you're not going to be able to hide it."

She leant back until her head found the cold kiss of the glass behind, whilst her hand returned to her lap. She plucked at the bobbles of wool that textured the edge of her cardigan; she teased them free and dropped them to the carpet. If only it were so easy to rid herself of this whole tangle of events. Perhaps it was wishful thinking to believe that she'd ever be able to hide it; after all, she was lucky it hadn't already made front page of the press. And just like she couldn't spend her life watching over her shoulder, wondering if today would be the day the assassin would make another attempt, she couldn't wake up each morning fearing that today would be the day Daisy would call to let her know the story had been leaked and the gaggle wanted a statement. Speaking out made sense.

Or she could quit. Then everyone would lose interest.

But she hadn't spent forty-five minutes sitting in that SUV every day, seeking the closest thing to boredom she could muster, just so she could drive back to DC and quit.

Despite everything, the job was part of her. Despite all that had happened, and the niggling feeling that, were she to say it out loud, Henry might not greet her with the same sentiment—_I'm with you_—part of her still wanted it. Or, at least, wanted a presidential run to be an option, so that it wouldn't be another thing that the poisoning had stolen from her. To choose not to run was one thing, but to feel like she had no choice other than to bow out because of this shame-cloud of oppo hanging over her head…? So, yes, in order to take control of the narrative and at least give her the chance of carrying on at State and making a White House bid, speaking out made sense.

But one thing remained. Perhaps the very thing that underpinned her reluctance. After all, did she really care what some ex-senator from Arizona or all the narrow-minded, 'struggling-is-weakness' people thought or said? It might hurt, but she would rise above it.

She let one last bobble drop, and then lifted her gaze to meet Mike's. Behind him the branches of the black walnut tree churned, leaf-stripped and vulnerable, winter's bared bones. Her chest ached until it felt as though the hollow she'd been filling in piece by piece over the past few weeks might crumble and collapse. "But how on earth am I meant to talk about this to the American public when I haven't got a clue what I'm going to say to my husband and kids?"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**We return to Henry's POV tomorrow. There's a lot of overlap in this sequence of five chapters. (Hopefully it works.)**


	68. Chapter Sixty-Six: the distraction

**Chapter Sixty-Six**

**…****the distraction.**

**Henry**

**9:31 AM**

"Last thing we heard, the Russians agreed to cooperate with the investigation and they accepted the secretary's terms for the BSR deal." Matt was stooped forward in the pale mauve armchair that nestled into the corner of the study, his black overcoat slung over the back. He took a swig from his coffee mug and then returned to cradling it in the gap between his knees. "I've gotta say, I'm surprised Russell didn't tell you about the shooting."

Blake leant back against the window ledge, his trench coat folded neatly and draped over his arm. His eyebrows arched whilst his gaze remained fixed on the stack of files he'd piled onto the edge of Elizabeth's desk, his eyes hazy with a faraway glaze. "He even has visual aids."

Henry's jaw tightened, though it already ached from the clench that had been building and building ever since Matt's 'story' had begun. "Well, in order to do that—" He bit the words out, and his voice rose louder step by step. "—he'd have to admit that he's been contacting her and _visiting_ her and feeding her information when I made it perfectly clear that he was to leave her alone."

He paused. Whilst the words settled over the room, he sought a breath to quell the simmer that burned beneath his skin, but his chest was bound too tight for that. Maybe he didn't really want to let it go. Anger felt easier somehow. He thrust one hand towards the grey gloom that seeped in through the net curtains. "She's meant to be focusing on her recovery, not playing detective, not taking meetings with the Russian foreign minister, not getting shot." His voice cracked.

He froze for a moment. Then the image of Elizabeth—skin ashen, irises blackened, lips stained with blood's infinite rouge—flooded in, and his hand fell empty at his side. He rubbed at his face, rubbed the image away, and then returned to gripping the edge of his desk. His nails dug into the wood.

He'd given her his glasses. She was meant to come back to him.

Blake's lips pursed, and he shot an anxious look in Matt's direction before he returned to Henry. "I feel we ought to stress that the secretary is fine. She was wearing a bulletproof vest—"

"Well, that would have brought us all so much comfort had she been shot in the head."

Matt turned his head from side to side, his gaze settled on the coffee still cradled in both hands. When he looked up, the hint of a smile played at the corners of his lips. "Shooters almost nev—"

"Matt." Blake cut in. He gave a quick shake of the head. A silent—_Zip it._

Matt stopped. But his lips drew into a somewhat sullen pout.

"And what if it had broken her ribs and punctured her lung or lacerated her liver or spleen?" Henry gestured towards Blake's torso. In the silence that followed, the simmer inside rose again and bubbled up beneath his skin. "And that's beside the fact that she should never have been in the position to be shot in the first place. She's meant to be on leave."

Blake held up one hand as though to push back that concern. "It really was only one call—"

"To you maybe." Henry fixed him with a firm stare.

The silence strained.

Blake averted his gaze and took sudden interest in his shoes, whilst Matt studied the surface of his coffee. They wore the looks of middle-schoolers hunkered on the chairs that lined the corridor outside the principal's office, their heads bowed, whilst they waited for their parents to arrive.

But they had no need to feel guilty. Matt had gone out of his way to help Elizabeth when she was still staying with Will in hospital; somehow he had managed to get her to eat and sleep when she'd refused to so much as listen to Henry. And Blake had always far exceeded the role of assistant when it came to looking after Elizabeth, from letting Henry know when she was getting stressed and could do with a break to keeping an extra bottle of her anxiety meds stashed in his desk just in case. It was Russell who ought to feel guilty.

Henry lowered his own gaze, ran his hand through his hair, and then gripped his neck. Maybe he ought to feel guilty too. For not getting her help sooner so that she never would have needed to go on leave, for letting himself believe that her silence meant she was truly engaging in therapy. He looked up, and his gaze darted between Matt and Blake. "I appreciate everything you've done for her and for our family. And I'm grateful to you for telling me. I just thought…" He trailed off. With his hand still clutching the back of his neck, he shrugged and then gave a sorry smile. "I just hoped she was taking this seriously."

Matt stared up at him. The whites of his eyes shone behind the lenses of his glasses, muddied by the reflected tint of the gloom outside. He opened his mouth to speak.

But Henry pushed himself away from the edge of his desk and motioned to the stack of State Department files in front of Blake. "As I said, let me know if there's anything else you need."

* * *

**11:31 AM**

The morning had passed in a haze. Henry tried not to think about it. About what Matt and Blake had said. Instead, he tried to focus on his classes. But it felt like the whole world hung at a distance, as though a thin layer of fog drifted between him and everyone else, and through that fog loomed thoughts, fears, worries. More than once he had lapsed into silence, only to be met with an awkward cough from one of his students that forced him to blink himself out of his vacant stare, flash a taut smile and riffle through his lecture notes as he scrambled for a hook that would remind him where it was he'd left off. He tried to cling to the hope that Elizabeth meeting with Avdonin, however reckless it might have been, meant that she was better than the last time he'd seen her, when she'd been too ashamed to confide in him those thoughts that plagued her, thoughts that told her she didn't deserve to be alive, thoughts that told her she didn't deserve his love. But that hope offered as much salve as alcohol rub to a wound. He needed her to be better. Not better than before. Better. Full stop.

He couldn't have her coming home, only for a week, a month, a year later to find her standing in the shadows of their closet thinking those same thoughts. He couldn't have her coming home, only to be forced to send her away again because he couldn't watch her twenty-four hours a day and she posed a serious risk to herself. He couldn't have her coming home, only for her to—.

Full stop.

The whole point of her going to the clinic was for her to be free from distractions. What good was that when the distractions brought themselves to her?

Henry strode along the corridor of the White House. The skies outside were so dark that the yellowed light from the wall sconces and chandeliers reflected off the windows and turned the hallway into a tunnel, thick with a claustrophobic feel. The stale heat that the line of chipped-white radiators pumped out only added to that sense, so not only the walls closed in, but the air did too.

A flurry of black suits rounded the corner at the end; amidst them, a flash of cerulean.

"Dad?" Stevie halted. Her clutch on the two takeaway coffee cups tightened so much that one of the plastic lids popped off. She cursed and ducked away from the middle of the corridor and dumped the cups down on a walnut console table. She shook her fingers out, and then stooped over the table and pressed the lid back into place. "What are you doing here?" She twisted around and glanced at him, her smile more than a touch strained.

"I need to speak to Russell."

The smile vanished. "Why?"

Henry gave her a look. _Did she interrogate everyone who came to see Russell? _"Because there's something he and I need to discuss."

She brushed past him, a coffee cup in either hand, and she walked with a teetering stride towards Russell's office. "Well, uh, he's gone out."

"How long will he be?" He followed a pace behind.

"I'm not sure."

"Stevie."

She glanced back at him. Her voice came sharp, defensive. "What? He didn't say exactly."

Henry stopped. Something niggled. Not just her current evasiveness, but the way it echoed of her behaviour at home. And that look of mild panic. Especially when anyone mentioned what she might or might not know from working with Russell. "Were you aware that he's been calling and visiting your mother?"

Stevie froze. Her shoulders tensed as though someone had dragged their fingernails over a chalkboard. Slowly, she turned around and revealed her wince of a smile. "I wasn't _not_ aware."

"_Ste-vie_." Henry dragged out her name. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because he asked me not to." Her voice strained.

"And if he asked you to jump out of a window?"

"Well, that would totally depend. I mean, are we talking first storey, here? And is there a fire?"

Henry paused. His eyes narrowed on her. "He's there now, isn't he?"

"I don't know."

"Stevie." His tone warned her.

"What?" Her eyes widened. "I don't know…for sure."

"Right." Henry strode away and left her floundering in the middle of the corridor.

"Where are you going?" she called after him.

"To get him to leave your mother alone."

"Well, can you perhaps not mention me, because if he thinks that I told you…"

Henry turned the corner, his pace so brisk that the fronts of his woollen blazer flapped in time with his stride. From the thud through his ears, his pulse kept tempo too.

"Dad…? Dad…?" Stevie's voice grew softer and softer. He could imagine her crumpled expression and the shudder of her shoulders as she said, "God. I'm so screwed."

* * *

**12:59 PM**

Two black SUVs waited outside the clinic gates, one parked in front of either of the grey stone pillars, half on the grassy verge, half on the gravel track. The windshields of both vehicles faced towards the main road, so that the agents inside could watch the comings and goings, but not one of the agents gave Henry so much as a cursory glance as his car slowed and arced off the tarmac.

The gravel crackled and churned beneath the tyres as the car sailed through the open gates and along the valley between the paper birch trees that weaved towards the red brick building at the end. The sound irked like static on an old record, magnified a hundredfold, and it set already frayed nerves on edge. Driving would normally have soothed him, the monotony of grey skies, grey road, skeletal grey branches looming over both providing a meditation of sorts, but instead, each kilometre that clunked over wound him a twist tighter, whilst the backdrop dissolved into a projector screen to replay the thoughts that had flurried through his mind the last time he had made that trip.

_Earlier on, when you asked me if I'd thought about it… I'm sorry that I lied._

He thought he knew fear. From the swarm of midwives after Jason was born, to the edge in Conrad's voice when he told him Elizabeth had missed her transport out of Iraq, to the roil of cold nausea when news broke of the coup in Iran, to the look in Jay's eyes when he told him she had collapsed. But the way she had spoken that night, the way she had withdrawn into the shadows, the way he had looked into her eyes only to find that her soul—the thing he'd thought would never fade—had gone… It redefined fear. It warped it into something more penetrating, more consuming, more urgent than before. It felt like every second hung on a knife edge. Like any moment would see her swept over the cusp. Because external threats could be managed, risks could be minimised, perilous situations could be avoided altogether. But how could anyone protect her from something as intangible and invisible as a thought?

The car pulled out from the tunnel of birch trees and curved around the edge of the grassy island that marked the centre of the car park. Opposite the end of the track, the ground level window gaped from floor to ceiling, and the yellow light inside flooded out. Henry guided the car into the bay nearest the window. The brakes whined as it drew to a halt. The hum of the engine died. He unclicked his seatbelt. He reached for the door handle. He stopped.

For a moment, his breath froze in his chest and the anger at Russell for disturbing Elizabeth when she was meant to be focusing on therapy, the disappointment to learn she had been in contact with people at work, the powerlessness from not knowing how he could help her, the fear from knowing he couldn't protect her from her own thoughts, the dull ache that came from every second of missing her, the jolt of shock from hearing she'd been shot…disappeared. It felt as though he had flown through seething skies only to emerge from the clouds and stumble upon a patch of calm.

There she was. Beyond the glass.

She perched at one end of the leather couch, stooped forward slightly as she wound a ribbon of pasta around a wooden fork, held it there, studied it, and then let it drop. The slight pinch to her brow was the same pained expression she wore on those down days when she'd lose herself in a tangle of thoughts. Normally he'd squeeze her shoulder and press a kiss to the top of her head, and with a weak smile she'd shake it off. _Away with the horses, that's all_. But as she lifted a forkful of sauce to her lips and then stopped, the frown deepened. Whatever she said next, it flooded her expression with hurt. In that moment he realised that part of him had been clinging to the hope that he'd been wrong, that he'd arrive at the clinic to find that she was better after all.

But there she was. Beyond the glass. And she looked just as troubled as she'd been in the days after coming home from the ward.

The hope gave way, and as it did, it created a vacuum into which everything else returned in a rush. That moment of calm gone. Something new emerged as well though. A bitter sting from the feeling that he'd let her down. Powerless to help her in any other way, he'd ensured that at least she'd be left alone to focus on herself. Or so he thought.

Sat at the opposite end of the couch, Russell wedged his fork at the edge of his carton and then leant back into the corner of the seat and rested his arm along the top. He watched Elizabeth as she chewed in silence, her every movement a chore. A long moment passed before their conversation resumed.

When Elizabeth's shoulders flinched, accompanied by another flicker of hurt, something inside Henry snapped, and he wrenched open the car door. The slam echoed out behind him as he stormed towards the entrance; each footstep collapsed into the gravel with a _scrunch_.

The first set of glass doors swooshed aside as he approached, and the reflection of the gloom-riddled car park disappeared. The second set remained resolutely shut, and he jabbed at the intercom on the wall. A low _bl-bl-bl-bleep _rang out.

He waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The seconds stretched into an eternity as endless as the repetition of his reflection in the mirrors that covered either wall. Elizabeth had explained it to him once, when they were still at UVA. The mirrors, and the link to math. He hadn't understood it at the time, only that with the way she spoke with such intensity, her eyes alight as though with each word she were revealing a secret world, one where beauty engraved every molecule, that he could spend a lifetime listening to her talk and it would never grow old. Now, all he understood was this: he needed her—that Elizabeth—back. The one who burned with life. And not just for the sake of him or their kids, but for her. She deserved to feel that joy—that boundless passion—again.

Amy, the young woman who had checked Elizabeth into the clinic, and who had so kindly reminded him on more than one occasion that Elizabeth had requested that he not call, appeared from the shadows of the corridor that led to the office and strode across reception towards the door. She punched the code into the keypad on the wall. Half a second. Then the door slid aside.

"Dr McCord." She gave a blink like a startled owl, and stepped back as he strode inside. "Elizabeth's busy right now and she requested—"

"_Busy_?" Henry sent her an incredulous look, and he pointed along the corridor. "She's eating pasta with the White House Chief of Staff."

Her gaze flicked away from him, and only then did he notice Elizabeth's DS agent, Jimmy, stood just inside the glass doors.

Jimmy cast Henry a wary look, and then returned to Amy. "Perhaps I ought to get Mr Jackson."

"Perhaps you should. Perhaps then he can explain why it is he's been calling and visiting my wife when he shouldn't be in contact with her at all, and how it is my wife came to be shot."

Another wary look, one that lingered twice as long as before. Then, without a word, Jimmy strode away and disappeared into the darkened hallway that led past the office. The squeak of his footsteps faded into silence and ended with a sharp _rap-tap_ of knuckles against wood.

Whilst voices drifted along the corridor, Amy stared at Henry with the look of someone who has something to say but isn't quite sure whether they want to find out how that something would be received. "Dr McCord, we take confidentiality very seriously here, and I want you to know that in regards to Mr Jackson's contact, Elizabeth signed all the consent forms." She turned her head from side to side and avoided his gaze. "As for the incident last week, we keep all the doors locked, but Elizabeth let herself out—"

"She's ex-CIA. Did you really think she couldn't get past a key code?" Henry swept his hand towards the metal panel on the wall.

Amy's mouth hung open whilst her tongue tasted the air for a response. When seconds had passed and no reply had come, she pursed her lips and withdrew into an awkward silence.

Henry's jaw tightened. He turned away from her, and shook his head to himself. He shouldn't be angry with her, not really, but these were the people he'd trusted with Elizabeth's safety; these were the people who, apparently, were better equipped to care for her than he could have at home. The fault lay with Russell. After all, Elizabeth wouldn't have been involved with the investigation in the first place if he hadn't been feeding her information, consent forms or not.

Minutes passed before the _thunk _of a door butting against its frame shook down the corridor. Whispers followed. Then Russell's unmistakable rasp. "He's what?"

"…"

"What is it with these McCords?"

"…"

A huff. "Fine. I'll handle this. You keep an eye on her—_Discreetly_." Then he added in a mutter, "Unless you want your head bitten off."

The squeak of soles against the linoleum floor grew louder and more piercing. Amy backed away two-and-a-half steps, and then spun around and pretended to study the text of the maintenance sticker plastered to the side of the water dispenser. Though, every other second or so, she glanced over her shoulder, her gaze lingering just long enough to drink in the scene.

"Henry." Russell strode out from the shadows of the corridor and into the drab warmth that hummed down from the fluorescent strips that lined the ceiling. "I'm in the middle of something right now, so let's keep this brief." He came to a stop two strides away. His hands found his hips. A deep breath lifted his shoulders. Then, with a sigh, they fell, and the words tumbled out. "You need to pull yourself together and go home."

"Excuse me?" Henry frowned and drew his chin back.

"Whatever _this_—" Russell motioned to Henry, head to toe and back again. "—is, I don't have time for it, and frankly, I don't care. So, as I said, you need to pull yourself together and go home."

With that, he turned around and stalked towards the corridor.

"My wife got shot, Russell."

Russell stopped. With his back still to Henry, he cast him a look over his shoulder. "I think you'll find that's on her. I told her to let us handle it."

Henry's frown deepened. "You shouldn't be telling her anything at all. I made it perfectly clear that you were to leave her alone."

Russell faced him. "You did." He gave a flinch of a shrug. "But, turns out, not your call."

A clench gripped Henry's jaw. "She's my wife."

"So, congratulations." Russell held his hands out wide. "You married the woman and have the certificate to prove it—" He cocked an eyebrow. "—I presume. Doesn't give you the right to make her decisions for her."

"I'm not making her decisions for her—"

"No. Just dictating who she can and can't talk to."

The clench in Henry's jaw tightened and forced him to bite the words out. It gave each a clipped tone. "The whole point of her coming here was to get away from that environment and to give her space to deal with her issues. How's she meant to do that when you're bringing work to her, involving her in the investigation, and putting her in a position to be shot?"

Russell eyed him. Silence flowed thick through reception. It felt as though he were assigning each of Henry's words a number and adding up some, subtracting others, all in a bid to calculate his response. "As I said, that's on her… Now, if you're done—"

"You need to leave her alone. No more calls, no more visits, no more _lunch dates_." Henry swept a finger towards the corridor.

Russell raised his eyebrows and let out a huff, a derisive laugh. "So that's your issue? You can't stand the fact that your wife's perfectly happy talking to me, but for whatever reason, she's decided she'd rather not talk to you."

The sting came out of nowhere, like a cut discovered only after chilli had seeped into the wound. Henry bit down on the inside of his cheek, and willed himself to calm, but the gleam in Russell's eyes goaded him, and the burn coursed through him until it consumed. "Does she know that you had our daughter lie for you?"

Russell's gaze dipped and he smoothed his tie down against his shirt. Utter nonchalance. "Yes. And she knows all about Morejon, and anything else you'd care to get indignant about. So if your plan was to use that against me—" His gaze flicked up. "—assuming of course that she was prepared to talk to you, I think you'd find it might backfire on you." He returned his hands to his hips, and his shoulders jerked forward in a way that seemed to say—_So, what are you going to do about it?_

Henry's nostrils flared. "You know, if you'd just left her alone like I told you to, she could be back at work by now. Save you driving all the way out here."

"And what does that tell you?"

"That you're not seeing the bigger picture. That if she doesn't deal with this properly now, she'll end up back where she was four weeks ago. Then what will you do? Ditch her, find a new secretary of state and groom somebody else for the White House?"

Russell stared at him. There was a simmering chill to his gaze, and as the seconds spun out, it felt as though he were making a mental list of all the ways he could have Henry eliminated, just another threat to his agenda.

Then he let out a low huff, shook his head to himself, and turned away. He flapped Henry aside—"Go home, Henry."—and he retreated to the corridor.

Henry's voice shot up. "Not until you stop distracting her and leave her alone."

Russell spun back to face him. His shoulders hunched forward. His eyes flared. His voice reduced to a hiss. "The only distraction here is you."

The muscles of Henry's legs tightened as he resisted the reflex to draw back half a step. In the corner of reception, Amy had abandoned her pretence of examining the sticker on the water cooler and now made no effort to conceal her gawp.

Russell stabbed a finger at him. "All the time, she worries about you, and her brother, and Stevie, and whatever the other two are called." His fingers fumbled at a loss for Alison's and Jason's names. "She never would have tried to leave in the first place if she hadn't been so obsessed with looking after her brother. She never would have put herself in the position to be shot if she weren't preoccupied with the idea that the assassin might come after one—or all—of you."

Russell skulked a step closer to Henry, his expression fixed in a snarl. Though he lowered his voice a fraction, his tone grated even more. "Right now she thinks you're at home, looking after your kids, safe in the protection of the Secret Service agents that I went out of my way to assign you, just so that she needn't worry about you, but that apparently you so gratefully ditched somewhere on your way here. But if she were to find out that, in all actuality, you're out here making a scene, without any protection, and that everything isn't rainbows and unicorns at home, how do you think she'd react? Hmm?" His eyes widened, as though prompting a response. "Do you think she'd find that reassuring and think it okay to focus on herself, or do you think she'd be so distracted by thoughts of the rest of you and some misplaced sense of guilt over leaving you to fend for yourselves that she'd get it into her head that it was time for her to pack up and leave again, regardless of whether she was ready or not?"

The pause lingered in the air as thick and heavy as the smell of earth after a storm.

Russell straightened up and let his gaze flick over Henry for a long second. "Now, if you're quite finished, I've left your wife alone in a room with a tray of pasta, the same pasta someone used to poison her and her brother, and every minute I'm out here dealing with you and your issues, she could be careening towards the edge of panic for all I know, so as I told you before, I don't have time for this, so you need to pull yourself together and go home."

Henry's mind scrambled. It felt like the seconds after a plane engine cuts out, when all thought is lost behind a barrier of silence and you're flailing for a way to break through, to seize upon the plan you know has been drilled into you, and to take control.

The moment replayed in his mind. Elizabeth, a pained pinch in her brow as she laboured over a mouthful of the pasta, and the way Russell had stopped and watched her, not with judgment but with concern. Driving all that way to see her. Bringing her pasta from the restaurant. His insistence on confronting her with what had happened. The bigger picture…?

Henry looked to Russell. "You're her friend."

Russell averted his gaze and shrugged off the observation. "Yeah, well, you can't fulfil every role in her life. Certificate or not."

The anger had dissipated, and it left Henry drained. No— Bereft. He stood in his own pocket of rarefied silence, like the stillness that existed above the clouds, whilst the squeak of shoes against the expanse of mottled blue linoleum carried Russell down the corridor.

"How is she?" Russell's voice came from a distance far greater than the length of the hall.

"…"

"What do you mean 'staring'?"

"…"

"Okay. But she's calm?"

Henry wanted to follow, but his whole body had frozen.

Elizabeth was a pragmatist, a fan of 'whatever works', though sometimes she feared that made her less moral. _Promise me you'll always be my compass and keep me on track_. But now it felt like all the magnetic fields were off. He ought to be grateful that Russell had been trying to help her, it shouldn't matter how she got better so long as she did. But instead, realising that he himself was 'the distraction' and not the one who would bring her comfort and enable her to return to herself left him feeling lost. He was meant to be the man beside the woman, her partner, the one who would protect her at all costs, but now to surrender that role to someone else…?

Perhaps this was his atonement for not getting her help sooner, for thinking he knew her better than others possibly could. If so, he'd rather say a thousand Hail Marys. Hell, he'd rather go through the one hundred and eight bows of Korean Buddhism a thousand times over, back-to-back. Anything to distract him from the emptiness that ached out from his heart.

_"__And maybe it's true that I need him more than he needs me, but sometimes that's how relationships work."_ That's what she'd said about Will the evening they'd stood in the shadows of the family room and he'd asked her to spend one night at home. At the time, it had taken all of his effort to resist telling her he knew just how that felt.

But now he truly understood.

He needed her.

But all she needed was for him to go.

And though it hurt like nothing else, for her, he would.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	69. Chapter Sixty-Seven: checks and balan

**Chapter Sixty-Seven**

**…****checks and balances.**

**Elizabeth**

**1:01 PM**

"Your pal, Durchenko, came through." Russell stooped over the coffee table that stood between the pair of leather armchairs and the couch opposite. He placed a wooden fork atop each of the two pallid-yellow polystyrene cartons, and then hauled the table closer to the couch; its feet scuffed against the carpet, and the light above rippled off the glass. Then he twisted around and shot Elizabeth a look. "Wasn't happy about you calling in a favour though."

Elizabeth lifted her bottle of water to her lips, and then paused and arched her eyebrows. "He never is."

"Told me to tell you that you're even now." Russell slumped down onto the cushion next to her, and smoothed his tie to his chest as he did so. He snatched up his fork and popped the lid off his carton. The smell of sautéed garlic, slow-simmered tomatoes and creamy béchamel spilled out.

Elizabeth's grip on the water bottle tightened a fraction, and the plastic crackled. At Russell's glance, the whites of his eyes alight with a flash of concern, she placed the bottle down on the table and dragged her own carton closer, avoiding his stare. "Well, I don't know about that."

She unfastened the lid and poked at the pasta with the prongs of her fork. Outside, gravel churned and brakes whined to a stop. She wound half a ribbon of pappardelle around the fork and lifted it above the dish; as it hung there, streaks of the orange and white sauces slithered down the rest of its length. Her hunger had been less than inspiring prior to Russell arriving, but now the growing clench in her stomach told her that she would have to force the mouthfuls down.

She let the pasta drop back onto the nest below. "Plus, so long as I'm secretary of state, I can always have him removed from US soil. Not a bad piece of leverage to have."

Russell studied her as he chomped over a mouthful. His gaze raked hot against her cheek. "Another reason for you to get yourself signed off."

"I'm working on it."

"I know you are. You just need to keep it up. No nosediving at the last hurdle."

She scooped up a forkful of the bolognese sauce. She lifted it to her mouth. She paused. "I'm beginning to think that home itself is the biggest hurdle of all."

The words fell into a lull.

Russell continued to watch her as he chewed. Then he wedged his fork between the tangle of pasta ribbons and the edge of the carton, and with his gaze never leaving her, he leant back into the corner of the couch and rested his arm along the top of the cushions. He drummed his fingers there for a moment, and then stilled. "Mike mentioned you were feeling apprehensive."

Elizabeth snorted. She pressed the back of her hand to her lips as she swallowed the bite. "I'm sure that's not the word he used." It did explain the impromptu pasta delivery though.

"Your family are fine, Bess, and they'll be glad to have you home. Once you're ready."

"Sure." She attempted a shrug of nonchalance, as though it really were that simple, but it came out as more of a flinch, an exclamation mark to the lie that word held. Because, in truth, the closer she came to being allowed home, the more distant she felt from the way things were before the poisoning…and all that had followed.

The clunk and slam of a car door echoed out, muffled by the glass of the window and followed by the _scrunch, scrunch, scrunch_ of footsteps over the gravel.

When the footsteps quietened, the silence in the room felt deeper than before. Perhaps a taste of what would greet her when she finally went home.

She shovelled in another mouthful of sauce. The tomatoes were too rich, and the béchamel clagged at the back of her tongue.

"Look—" Russell lingered over the word. "I know it's Stevie's birthday on Thursday… I don't want this turning into another Thanksgiving episode."

She twisted around and stared at him whilst she poked pieces of ground beef free from her teeth using the tip of her tongue. "You mean you don't like getting calls in the middle of the night saying the secretary of state is planning to hop in an Uber in a bid to escape from a mental health clinic, only for her to fail to make it one step out of the door?"

She held his gaze for a long moment, daring him to rise to the bait. Had he met her with even a hint of judgment, it might have eased her apprehension a little, but the concern that lurked in his eyes only reminded her just how much the dynamics had changed since the last time she'd been well and at home.

She turned away again, shook her head to herself, and raked through the pasta with her fork. "I just need to figure some things out, that's all."

A heavy pause.

Then a sharp _rap-tap_ echoed through the door.

Elizabeth's head snapped around. Jimmy, her DS agent, stood on the other side of the gridded glass panel set into the door, wearing an apologetic, if slightly uneasy, expression. At Russell's bark for him to come in, he rattled the handle and pushed the door open with a swoosh.

"Ma'am, I'm sorry to interrupt—" He leant into the gap between the door and its frame. "—but, Mr Jackson, can I have a word?"

"Later. I'm a little busy right now." Russell gestured to the takeaway boxes of pasta.

Jimmy shook his head. "I'm afraid it can't wait, sir."

Russell eyed him. "Well, what is it then?"

"It's…" Jimmy's gaze flicked to Elizabeth, and then back to Russell. "…sensitive, sir."

"Sensitive how?"

"If we could just speak outside…"

Russell stared him down, and after several seconds had dragged their way through that wasteland of a pause, punctuated by the _clunk…clunk…clunk…_ of the clock that hung above the door, and still Jimmy hadn't moved, he gave a huff. "Fine." He waved Jimmy away again. "Just give me a minute." Then he sent Jimmy an acid sharp stare. "And there'd better be a war about to break out, or the economy capsizing. I thought I made it clear that we were not to be disturbed."

Jimmy hesitated for a moment, but perhaps had no response to that, or at least not one he was willing to give this side of the door. Then he nodded to Elizabeth—a taut smile—before he stepped into the hallway. With the door closed, he waited there, his back turned to the glass.

Was it wrong that with the way Jimmy's gaze had fallen upon her when he'd said 'sensitive', that part of her hoped that war _had_ broken out? Better that than learning something had happened to Henry, the kids or Will. Though, as Russell and Dr Sherman kept reminding her, she was the target, no one else. There was an odd kind of comfort in that.

"I'll send someone in to sit with you." Russell eased to his feet, and as he skirted around the end of the coffee table and along the gap on the opposite side that ran in front of the two armchairs, he pointed vaguely towards the cartons. "I don't want you sitting in here alone."

"Russell—" Elizabeth's hair swayed against her cheeks as she shook her head. "I'm perfectly capable of sitting in a room with some pasta."

"The other week you weren't," he muttered as he strode towards the door.

She chucked her fork down onto table. The clatter wasn't half as satisfying had the fork been made of metal. "Look, this is precisely what I don't want."

Russell stopped. He turned to face her.

"People acting all weird around me, walking on eggshells, acting like I'm a different person because of this." She motioned to the whitewashed walls that had silently absorbed the drip, drip, drip of all the fears and thoughts Dr Sherman had squeezed out of her day after day. It was a surprise that they hadn't begun to mould. "It's bad enough that other people are going to treat me like that, I don't need you doing it too."

"And I don't need you panicking and backsliding right now." Russell's voice grated through the room. His shoulders rounded forward as he spoke—near yelled—as though stooping closer would make the message all the more clearer. "It doesn't take a therapist to see that your mood's off. Even Mike had his concerns, and his empathy level's on a par with that of a sociopath."

Elizabeth's eyes bugged, whilst she thrust one hand up, her fingers splayed. "That's because he is a sociopath."

"Doesn't change the fact that something's off with you." Russell fixed her with a firm stare, daring her to deny it, his expression contorted into half snarl.

But that was more welcome than the concern and sympathy of before. Elizabeth glared back at him, refusing to blink. "I don't need babysitting, Russell."

"It's not about babysitting." His voice strained whilst he arched back and addressed the ceiling in exasperation. It was as though he were having an argument with someone who refused to believe, despite the Principia Mathematica's extensive proof, that one plus one really did equal two.

A long silence followed.

Then, with his hands on his hips, he shook his head to himself, his jaw clenched, whilst his gaze sailed out towards the gloom that leached through the window. "You need to learn your limits and accept that maybe there's a reason why people worry about you."

The air between them simmered, awaiting—or perhaps inciting—her response.

When it didn't come, he turned and stalked away towards the door.

She waited until he reached it before she muttered, "Well, I wish they wouldn't."

It was meant to be the last word.

But he stopped. His fingers curled around the handle. He turned his chin to his shoulder, and sent her no more than half a sideways glance. His voice had softened. "Checks and balances, Bess. We all need someone to keep us in line."

When the door thunked shut, Elizabeth slumped into the chilly embrace of the leather cushions and let her head fall back to rest against the top of the couch. With her eyes closed, she pinched the bridge of her nose and then took a breath that rolled to the bottom of her lungs and burned along the curve of her ribs, like a flame fizzling its way along a fuse. The fire didn't die out though, once the pain had gone. Instead, it caught and flared—wildfire coursing across the inside of her skin. Why did Mike have to bring up Operation 'Bare her Soul to the Public'? Why couldn't Russell be his normal snarky self, rather than condescending to her with his concern? Why couldn't the both of them just be wrong?

She pressed her fists into the cushion beneath her, and pushed herself up from the couch. The carpet bristled beneath her bare soles as she squeezed through the gap between the seat and the coffee table and then ambled past the armchairs and towards the window that looked out onto the car park. The branches of the black walnut tree gyred in the breeze, a snarl of grey-green veins against the slate-rucked sky. Though the air of the therapy room held the stagnant warmth churned out by the radiators, she gathered her cardigan around her and folded her arms over her chest—the ache the pressure brought to her ribs not entirely unwelcome.

Mike was right: she couldn't hide what had happened, or at least not for long, and so the best option was to come out and talk. But that didn't change the fact that she didn't have a clue how to put it into words. And Russell was right: people would have their worries, some of which would be well-founded, and she'd have to learn to listen to them and to use them as a support network. But that didn't change the fact that she didn't want people's perception of her to alter, nor did she want to become a burden or to have them stifle her with their concerns.

One step at a time. Great in theory, when you wanted to move forward. Not so great when you wanted to go back. And more than anything, she wanted to go back. Reaching the state she had to require an inpatient stay felt like a loss of innocence, not only for her but for all who knew her. It brought to life a situation that, though always a possibility, felt as remote and hypothetical as Code Night Watch. After all, who really believes that they or the ones they love will descend into the murky depths of mental illness, any more than they believe that the next twenty minutes would see them descend into nuclear holocaust?

Until it happens.

And once it happens, you can't return to that blithe innocence of before. Possibility becomes reality. Probabilities shift. Some things you can't unlearn.

Following Code Night Watch, a recurrence of the situation became not a matter of 'if' but 'when'. As much as DoD might have liked to, they couldn't pretend it hadn't happened. As much as they all wished, they couldn't forget that moment when they saw their children for the last time and knew they'd never grow old. Those endless minutes would forever haunt them.

So, no, they couldn't go back to a time when mutually assured destruction was a hypothetical possibility. No more than she could wind back the clock and free her family and colleagues from the knowledge that she could—and would—cross over the cusp between mentally well and unwell before losing herself in its maze of shadows.

Still, she'd give anything to return to how things were before.

She didn't want people to worry about her, she didn't want them to police her, she didn't want them to look at her as though she were a different person. Not quite his wife. Not quite their mother. Not quite his sister. Not quite their colleague or friend or boss. A person in pieces. Repaired. But, with the cracks ever visible, not quite robust enough to touch.

After Code Night Watch, with no option to go back but unable to live in that limbo waiting for the next STRATCOM call, they had found a way to move forward: the agreement to de-alert. It provided them all with the reassurance that such a situation was unlikely to reoccur, and with time, things had settled back to normal. Or almost. They would never forget what had happened, but the mushroom cloud no longer lurked on the horizon. The probabilities shifted down again, even if the fear remained a little higher than before.

One step at a time. Going back was impossible, and perhaps wishing for it would only tangle her in a web of wanting that would stop her from moving forward. For weeks, she had wanted nothing more than to leave the clinic; now, she was more at risk of sabotaging herself into staying so that she needn't face her fears of how things might be when she returned home. What she needed was a way to de-alert. But how, exactly, does one de-alert when it comes to mental health? How was she meant to reach a state where people were no longer on edge around her and where they treated her the same, or almost the same, as before?

With a gust of wind, the branches of the black walnut tree lurched and strained, and the crows that had been roosting in its upper reaches sprang into flight. Their wings beat the air like fans cut from shadows, and they climbed up to wheel in loose circles over the car park.

Elizabeth's skin prickled, and she pulled her cardigan tighter, though little of the chill seeped through the window. Instead, it crawled up from inside her, like the memory of a shiver recalled from her bones.

* * *

**2002**

The sea of grass seethed and swarmed around her. The fronds scratched at her calves whilst her bare soles pounded the earth. Ahead, the branches of the black walnut tree crackled across the night and glowed in the pallid light that unspooled like a ribbon of milk-yellow silk from the moon.

The ribbon wrapped around her. It yanked her towards the cusp.

Her fingertips scrabbled, and her nails tore at the grooves in the bark. Her toes curled into the soil, whilst her heels jutted like the roots of the tree out over the abyss below.

"Take my hand." Fingers reached out. A tremor gripped them as they begged for her own. "Take my—"

But the soil beneath her disintegrated into sand. It avalanched backwards and ripped her away from her hold. She tumbled over and over whilst the sky above ached into endless blue. She landed on her feet. She raised one hand to shield her eyes from the sun whilst she squinted and recoiled.

The Humvee prickled into focus, as though each nanometer of it were a pinprick of light and one by one those pinpricks ignited. Mitch climbed up, and he hung from the door. His lips curved into that easy-going smile of his, but then, like a wave rippling out from his lips, his features morphed until it wasn't Mitch but Will. Only the smile remained the same. Then that faded too. "Mom and Dad are dead, Lizzie. We survived without them, you'll find a way to survive without me too."

BOOM.

The blast threw her body back, back, back until she slammed into the sand and skidded across the desert floor. She gasped for breath, but sand clogged her mouth, her nose, her throat. It clawed its way down into her lungs. It burned them. It coated them.

She rolled onto her front, and heaved herself onto all fours. She crawled towards the Humvee, groping through the veil of sand, sand, sand. But an arm wrapped around her waist and yanked her back. She wrestled herself free, or at least she tried to, but the grip tightened. And so instead she yelled. Her lips said, "Mitch." But her voice called out, "Will."

"Mickey, it's okay. I've got you."

Her body stilled. Somehow, her feet had found the ground, and she turned around.

"Mickey." Mitch gave her a tender smile. He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, and then cupped her cheek and brushed his thumb over the subtle arch of her cheekbone. He stared down into her eyes. _Seas of sapphires. _"You know how I feel about you."

But she shoved him away, both hands to his chest. "I love Henry, not you."

He staggered backwards. Behind him, the sand poured away like water over the edge of rock, and a chasm opened below. It sucked away all the sunlight, wrenching day into the darkest of night. The black walnut tree surged up from the earth.

Mitch teetered at the edge of the abyss. Eyes full of want and hurt.

She reached for him. Her fingers tremored. "Mitch! No!"

* * *

Elizabeth jolted upright. Sweat slicked her skin and stung in the bitter air, whilst her gaze reeled in drunken sweeps around the bedroom. A haze of amber from the streetlights outside slunk through the slats of the blinds and bled into the enveloping hush of midnight blue. The edges of her vision pulsed in time with the throb that thudded through her ears and drowned out the soft snuffle of Henry's snore. "_I'm Elizabeth to Henry, but I'm never—_never_—going to be more than Mickey to you._" Licks of hot nausea roiled up from the pit of her stomach. She threw the covers aside, not caring where they might land, and she half ran, half staggered towards the bathroom.

She slapped on the light. Dashed across the icy tiles. Wrenched the toilet lid up. Her whole body convulsed and tears scalded her eyes as her stomach squeezed itself inside out. There was nothing there to throw up, just acidic strings of saliva, but the retching wouldn't stop. Every last muscle clenched in her body's bid to purge itself.

An acrid rush of bile.

Relief followed.

With the chokehold on her body released, she gulped in billows of brisk air. At first, it burned almost as much as the bile. But with time, each breath became smoother and shallower than the last, and the pounding of her pulse settled.

She lurched over to the sink, flipped on the faucet, and the gush of water fizzled through the room. One hand scooped her hair into a bunch and held it back whilst the other cupped water to her lips. She rinsed out her mouth two, three times, jammed the faucet off, and then wiped her hand down against the towel that hung from the metal loop. Her lips she dried with a nudge to the strap of her tank top that slipped towards the curve of her right shoulder.

A bottle of TCP antiseptic stood at the back of the bathroom unit, its shallow neck and white plastic cap reflected in the bottom left-hand corner of the mirror. She snatched it up, along with the packet of cotton wool pads that leant against the wall, and then began the ritual again. The smell stung in her nose, even more so in her grazes and cuts. But, at the same time, it soothed too. Little kisses of pain to chase the dream away and remind her that she wasn't a ghost.

Footsteps stumbled across the carpet of their bedroom and then padded onto the tiles—that distinct soft sound as bare feet tacked to and then peeled from the ceramic.

She stopped. She didn't look at him though, just waited for him to appear behind her in the mirror. His fingertips gripped her hips, his body pressed against hers in a wall of warmth, he rested his forehead to the back of her head, and with eyes shut, he inhaled her.

Each time he did that, it felt as though he were praying. Maybe he was: a silent prayer of gratitude to God or to all those saints who brought him as much comfort as that grimy, saliva-sodden teddy bear brought Alison. Something about it irked her. No— It made her want to scream. There was no God, and if there were, He was the kid who throws rice to the pigeons; He was the firefighter who starts the fire; He was the confectioner of arsenic-laced marzipan; and He sure as hell wasn't the one who brought her home.

But, if it brought him comfort, she wouldn't take it away from him, no more than she'd wrench the toy from Alison. And at least in that moment of silence, whilst he frittered away words into the unknown, it lit up her body with the red hot glare of a flare and it gave her a brief respite from the soup-fog that suffocated her in numb and confusion.

Henry placed a kiss to the crown of her head, and then eased half a step back, close enough that his heat still hung next to her, far enough to allow a veil of chill air to fall between them. He peeled up the hem of her tank top to form a bandeau, exposing her lower back and stomach, and then took the TCP-dampened cotton wool from her and dabbed at the cuts that streaked her flesh in a meteor shower across her spine whilst she braced herself against the edge of the basin.

She stared past the reflection of the woman who she supposed was her, and watched him in the mirror; though it felt like she was looking through a pane of one-way glass, watching him and someone else in a separate room. With a slight pinch in the middle of his brow, he examined each cut before he cleansed it. It looked as though he were recalling every inch of the flesh he had known, loved, caressed, and he couldn't fathom how it had come to be anything other. Each mark an affront. An attack on something he held sacred. Graffiti over the sanctuary of a church.

She cleared her throat, but her voice still clagged. "Did you tell Will?"

He kept his gaze on her cuts, and shook his head.

She glanced away, towards the The Little Mermaid tumbler that now served as a toothbrush holder nestled in the right-hand corner against the wall, and she nodded. _Probably for the best_.

Then her gaze drifted back to him again. "You think he's right, don't you?"

He chucked the cotton wool pad into the bin beneath the sink, plucked a second from the packet, held it to the top of the uncapped TCP bottle as he turned the bottle over, and then clunked the bottle down on the side and returned to swabbing her abrasions.

She shook her head, and set the ends of her hair quivering. "But it's not the same."

He stooped in for a closer look at one of the cuts, his hands resting on her hips—maybe to steady himself, maybe for an anchor of a different kind.

"He's deliberately endangering himself, choosing to fly towards conflict and disaster, all for the sake of some ego trip." She paused.

The silence grew stagnant.

With a sigh, she shook her head to herself—another wisping of her hair against her shoulders. Then she stilled and locked gazes with her own reflection. She gave a firm nod. "I have a desk job."

"Is sitting at a desk what earnt you a half ton of shrapnel in your back?"

She glanced over her shoulder. "It's not that bad."

He squeezed antiseptic into the cut he'd been examining.

It seared through her flesh—battery acid would have been kinder. She winced, and her grip on the sink tightened until her knuckles blanched and almost pierced through the skin.

He straightened up and met her gaze in the mirror. His eyes were full of concern, but the darkness that lurked beneath said that some part of him had meant it to hurt.

She forced her hands to relax, and as her gaze dipped away, pulled by the tug deep within her chest, her voice softened to no more than a murmur. "It could have been worse."

The silence between them strained beneath the weight of that implication.

Henry returned his attention to her back, his touch a little rougher than before, the clench that ran along his jaw palpable. "And God forbid one day it is worse, what do you want me to tell the kids? Your mom's dead, but that's okay, because she had a desk at Langley."

She glared at him.

He ignored her. "Though I suppose I'll only have to explain it to Stevie. Alison will probably forget about you, and as for Jason, well, you'll just be the woman in the photographs."

Her grip on the sink tightened again, though this time for a different reason.

He shrugged. "Hell, maybe you think it'll be character-building. After all, it served you and your brother so well, losing your parents so young, one of you risking your life for the greater good, the other one risking his life to appease his narcissistic ego."

"Don't you _fucking_ dare." She spun around to face him.

He recoiled, his hands held up, the cotton wool pad slotted between two fingers. The darkness had fled his eyes, and shock overwhelmed his expression.

"You don't get to talk about them." She jabbed a finger at him. "You don't get to use them." Her voice cracked, and only fuelled the wildfire that blazed through her. "You don't."

He nodded, the rest of him still frozen.

She continued to glower at him for several hour-long seconds, until the flames simmered to a perpetual smoulder, and then she turned back to the mirror and hunched over the basin again.

He gripped his brow, and massaged the furrows deeper. "Elizabeth… I… That wasn't fair. I shouldn't have—"

"I'm going to pretend that you didn't." She shot him a look, held his gaze, and then braced herself, ready for the next sting of antiseptic.

But it never came.

Instead, he tossed the cotton wool pad into the bin. He stood beside her, his hip rested against the edge of the unit. His gaze raked over her, a silent assessment, as though he were trying to figure out just how far he could push her. "It won't be the only thing that we're pretending didn't happen."

She straightened up, and with her hands still resting against the cool ceramic of the sink and her chin slightly dipped, she shook her head so that her hair fell and trembled between them. "I'm giving you a free pass here, Henry." A sharp glance. "I suggest that you take it."

"It's not a free pass if avoiding the issue winds up with you being dead."

"It's my job." She tugged down the hem of her tank top, and turned to face him. She folded her arms across her chest, as much out of the chill that bristled through the air as the need to keep the distance between them.

"I know you want to make the world a safer place—"

She snorted. "You make it sound like Miss America pageant."

His voice rose. "But you can't keep ignoring the risks."

"Everything in life's a risk."

His jaw tightened, and his voice rose louder still. "And you're not going to placate me with some aphorism." He gestured, as though to bat the comment aside.

She brushed past him and strode towards the once white, now handprint-smeared and blue Crayola-ed, door that led into their bedroom. "You're meant to be my husband, Henry," she muttered. "I shouldn't have to placate you."

She reached for the cold bronze gleam of the handle.

"I heard that Jenny Mitchell gave birth."

She froze, her fingers midair. It felt like time had slammed on the brakes. The hairs at the back of her neck prickled, her skin alight with their static.

"A boy."

"Don't." The word came out lower than a growl.

"How do you think he'll feel growing up without a father?"

"I said: Don't."

"Do you think he won't mind that his father died the day before he was born, never even got the chance to hold him, all because he wanted to make the world a safer place?"

"Stop." She whirled around.

"No. You can't keep ignoring this." He motioned to her, head to toe. His eyes were steeped in darkness, though no shade of black could match what swarmed inside her. "That could have been you. Conrad told me you were meant to be in that vehicle."

Her voice soared to a shout, full of so much grit that it burned through her throat. "But I wasn't. And he was. And I'm the one who told him to take my place."

The darkness drained from Henry's expression in an instant—if only she could find a way to rid herself of the shadows that bound her soul half as quick—and the silence that her shout ushered in stood like a concrete wall between them.

A hot tear trickled down her cheek. Unwanted. Unbidden. She swiped it aside with the edge of her thumb.

A second tear rolled down too fast for her to catch and it tumbled and splashed against the tiles. At his side, Henry's fingers twitched as though thirsting to reach out and touch her. Just as Mitch had tried to, before she shut him down.

_Why the hell did he have to say it? Why the hell did he have to say it and then die and change everything? What if she hadn't pushed him away? What if she'd let him—_ But even knowing what she knew now, she knew she couldn't have done that, and somehow, knowing that only added an extra shade to the guilt, making it deeper. More absolute.

She fought to meet Henry's eye, but her gaze trembled. "He loved me, Henry."

Henry studied her. He gave a curt nod. "I know."

"No." Her voice strained. She raked one hand through her hair, and her fingers lodged in the roots. It was hard enough to say it once; why'd he have to make her repeat it? Her throat caught. "He _loved_ me."

His eyes widened a fraction, he nodded again, the words came slower. "I know."

She frowned. "What?"

"Elizabeth…" He shook his head, his gaze to the floor. When he looked up at her again, it was with a sorry smile. "Mitch adored you." He gave a small shrug. "Anyone could see that."

It knocked her back like a blow to the chest. She stumbled and bumped up against the door. The cold wood bit into her shoulder blades whilst her gaze skittered over the expanse of tiles; it scoured every inch of mottled grey, every crack of white, searching for just a glimmer of sense. _He knew and he never said anything? He knew and he left her painfully oblivious? He knew… But that meant she hadn't misunderstood. Why couldn't she have misunderstood?_

The tiles gave her nothing.

Her gaze darted up to Henry. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He stared back at her. Silent.

Her eyes narrowed on him. "Were you jealous?"

His lips flinched.

She crept a step closer. "Did you think it might give me ideas?"

His pout tightened.

"Do you seriously think that's what I do when I'm over there?" Her voice sharpened. Another step. "Just spread my legs for whoever wants it?"

When she gestured to the juncture of her thighs, just in case the meaning weren't already excruciatingly clear, his jaw clenched. A slight flare to his nostrils.

"Well?" She raised her eyebrows at him.

His chest swelled with a breath.

And, God, she wished he'd just yell at her. At least then she could be angry at him, at least then she'd be able to lash out, at least then she could find a release for everything inside that felt like a can of soda shaken and fit to burst.

But he didn't.

His voice was soft. His eyes were forgiving. His lips quirked into a sorry shrug. "I didn't want you to lose your friend."

Silence, just silence.

The world stopped, unable to keep on spinning beneath the weight of that.

Silence, just silence.

The air pulsed, its molecules scattered, an order lost that it would never get back.

Silence, just silence.

Then everything inside her collapsed.

Her breath ceased, and she crumpled to the floor. A moment later, Henry was knelt beside her. She shoved him away, then fisted the front of his t-shirt and clawed him close. Meanwhile, the tears tumbled down. And she hated every last one of them. He stroked her hair, hushed her, placed kisses to the bare skin of her shoulder. She hated that too, so she shrank away like a petulant toddler, and then she craved it the moment that it stopped.

Somewhere in that haze, her mind a shamal-stirred sandstorm, the sobs reduced to hiccups and her body shuddered and then surrendered to numb.

When she had quietened, he half coaxed, half hoisted her to standing, and with one hand supporting her own, the other light against the small of her back, he guided her to their bed. He reached down an extra blanket from the shelf at the top of the cupboard, as though he thought that layers of wool would be enough to warm her. But the chill didn't come from the December air; it crawled out from that vacant space inside her.

To lose a friend was one thing, but to lose a friendship felt like part of herself had been chiselled out. Mitch had always been a friend, often a refuge, sometimes a brother, but now she had to trawl back through every look, every touch, every expression. Had she led him on? Had she let him believe? Was there something she could have done differently?

The string of girlfriends—all slim, all sapphire-eyed, all blonde—each discarded with a shrug and an offhand comment. _She just wasn't the one_. The marriage to Jenny; his reluctance a well-partnered counterbalance to her enthusiasm. The long hours they spent together at Langley; the coffee breaks and canteen lunch dates; his eagerness to join her on assignments. Had she somehow fed the hope that maybe one day she'd be the one? If so, she had robbed him. If only she'd set him straight sooner, he could have moved on and found someone he would love as much as she loved Henry, instead of keeping one eye on her and one eye on his latest distraction.

And what about their colleagues? What about Jenny? _Mitch adored you. Anyone could see that_. They didn't think…? She didn't think…? Surely?

"Henry." She lay flat on her back, her hands fisted atop her stomach whilst she stared up at the shadows that danced across the ceiling. "Mitch and I… We never—"

"I didn't ask." His voice was gruff in the darkness.

She turned her face towards him. Her hair ruffled against the pillow. He lay on his back also, the whites of his eyes bright amidst the haze of black-blue. "I know, but I need you to know."

"I do. And I trust you." His gaze darted sideways to catch hers.

The look stretched like a silk thread between them.

But as the silence strained, it pulled that thread taut until it threatened to snap and sever that most tentative of connections, to see her drift away, back into that fog of numb.

"Make love to me?" she whispered.

"No." His gaze broke away and returned to the ceiling.

She studied him. She waited for the sting of rejection. But it didn't come. Instead, she nodded. He was right: God and religion aside, sex was something sacred between them, not a tool to be used no more than he could use her parents to win an argument, not a way to distract her from thought or to trick her into feeling something.

"Hold me?"

He lifted the covers and opened his arms to her. "Always."

She nestled against his chest and soaked up his warmth, whilst his heart beat beneath her, as steady and as soothing as a lullaby. It lured her towards sleep, a gentle tug that saw her grip on the night around her loosen until she was slipping from the room, down the rolling slope of sand and into a field where grasses seethed around her. The black walnut tree waited at the other side. Beyond that a chasm. And a question. _Fly or fall?_

Her eyes snapped open. Her fingertips curled into his chest. "One day it won't be Mitch."

His grip on her tightened. "That's what I'm afraid of."

He thought she meant her.

She thought it best not to correct him.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	70. Chapter Sixty-Eight: cart before the

**Note**: Sorry for any confusion at the end of the last chapter re "One day it won't be Mitch". What Elizabeth meant was that one day it won't be Mitch who dies. Henry thinks she's acknowledging that she could be the one who dies, in keeping with the conversation/argument they just had, but in reality she's thinking about the fact that Will has just joined Doctors Without Borders and she fears losing him—hence the recurrence of her dream, which has become tangled up in the loss of Mitch, someone who she's always seen as a close friend and sometimes like a brother. (The three chapters of the 2002 storyline are C18, C61 and C67.) I hope that makes more sense. : )

* * *

**Chapter Sixty-Eight**

**…****cart before the horse.**

**Elizabeth**

**1:25 PM**

"Elizabeth."

At Russell's voice, Elizabeth tore her gaze away from the branches of the black walnut tree that drew eddies in the lilts of the breeze, and she glanced over her shoulder towards the door of the therapy room. The afterimage of the tree silhouetted her vision, perhaps no different to the way her mood could stain her thoughts. Or should that be the other way around?

Russell guided the door shut with a thunk that reverberated through the wall. For a moment, his fingers remained rested against the handle whilst he eyed her somewhat cautiously, perhaps wary he might provoke another outburst. "Everything okay?"

"Fine." She returned to staring out across the sea of gravel, the fronts of her cardigan gathered in a loose fist. Grey skies, grey gravel, grey-green bark like plates of armour scaling the tree trunk. Could a mood stain a landscape too?

Before she could slip into the wallow of those thoughts, the rasp of footsteps through the gravel—a sombre stride across the car park—wrenched her out of her own head and back to the room with all the subtlety of a four thirty cell phone alarm vibrating against the bedside table.

She turned her back on the window, and then nodded towards the door. "Am I even allowed to ask what that was about?"

Russell waved it—whatever _it_ was—aside. "False alarm." He hunched over the coffee table, pushed her takeaway carton of the béchamel bolognese across to the opposite side, and then gestured to the armchair. "Take a seat."

She paused. The footsteps grew louder and louder, and then came to a halt on the other side of the glass. A chill crawled up the back of her neck. She turned—

"Bess."

Her head snapped back to Russell.

Still stooped over the coffee table, he stared up at her, his eyes wide and expectant. "Stop avoiding the pasta."

She paused for a moment longer, the prickle still present. If it weren't for the fact that DS were always watching her, she'd swear that someone was watching her. "I'm not avoiding; I'm thinking." She ambled over to the armchair.

He shot her a look as he lowered himself onto the couch. "Well, I'd prefer it if you didn't do that either."

"I'm sure you would." She slumped onto the leather cushion, her back to the window, and then held out her hand over the coffee table. "I'm guessing that policy applies at State as well."

"Could save us all a lot of trouble." He passed her the wooden fork she had thrown down onto the glass. A moment later, the muffled clunk then thud of a car door echoed out.

Now cooled, the sauce had thickened and the aroma softened, making it less appetising yet more palatable. With the polystyrene carton cradled in one hand, held close enough to catch any flecks of ragu or blobs of béchamel, she scooped morsel after morsel into her mouth. All the while, Russell's gaze remained hot on her, like the burn from a halogen lamp shone on the skin for too long. When she looked up, a ribbon of pappardelle sneaking from her lips, his gaze fell to his own carton and he dug through the pasta with his fork.

She definitely preferred the snark.

She nudged her lips with the back of her hand, her mouth still half-full as she spoke. "So…you said Anton came through."

"Yes." Russell dragged out the word.

"And…? Any unusual activity? Anything that could give us a lead on Kostov?"

"Apparently Volkov's the kind of guy who likes to keep busy, so the only unusual activity would be if he wasn't doing something unusual."

"I was hoping for something a little more helpful than 'the guy's into_ biznis_'."

Russell raised his gaze from the pasta. "Patience, young grasshopper."

She stared at him. Deadpan.

He returned to winding a length of pappardelle around the fork. "Durchenko did some digging on the embassy servers. Uncovered some deleted emails between Volkov and the GRU officer our agents in country saw making the live drop with the leader of your fan club."

She stopped, a forkful of sauce halfway to her mouth. "What did they say? The emails."

"We don't know. They were all in code."

_Of course they were… Yet still— _"But it's proof of a link. Volkov could be the handler."

"Could be. But it's circumstantial at best."

"And circumstantial's better than nothing." She placed the carton down on the coffee table, reached over and snatched up her bottle of water. The plastic crackled as she took a swig. With her gaze fixed on Russell, she clutched the bottle in the gap between her knees, her elbows rested to her thighs, her shoulders rounded forward. "So, have the FBI brought him in? Volkov?"

"Diplomatic immunity, remember." Russell stuffed a forkful into his mouth.

"There's got to be some wiggle room."

"Not without the Russians signing off—" His words were muffled by the pasta. "And given the fact you wouldn't give them any wiggle room on your BSR deal—" His gaze flicked up to her. "—which we'll make sure you get full credit for, by the way, once this whole thing's been declassified." He returned to scraping the bottom of the carton. "—we didn't think they'd be too receptive to that."

"But they agreed to cooperate."

"They did."

Her eyes widened. "So, did you at least ask?"

"We did."

"And?"

He looked up at her. "They recalled him to Moscow."

"What?" The bottle let out a loud snap as her grip tightened.

Outside, an engine purred into life. A moment later, tyres prickled away across the gravel and faded towards the track. It felt like the car carried with it all hope of catching Kostov.

"They said they'd look into it as part of their enquiries." Russell chucked his empty carton down onto the table, the fork strewn across the slicks of sauce that smeared the base. "Which means either they'll interrogate him as they said they will—"

"If by 'interrogate' you mean 'torture'."

"Are you really opposed?" Russell quirked an eyebrow at her.

_Yes_. The word sprang to her tongue.

But it died there. Maybe she had become a different person after all—_Elizabeth the Unethical_ as well as _Secretary of Unfit Mental State_.

He let the pause linger longer than necessary, as though to draw emphasis to the answer held within her silence, before he continued. "Or they'll give him a hero's welcome and he'll be free to run Kostov from there. Or they'll just pass the job onto someone else. God knows they've got enough 'attachés' hanging out here."

"You still think the Kremlin's involved?"

"Who knows?" Russell held his hands wide and sank back against the couch. "I don't think even the Kremlin knows for sure."

Each fact, each assumption, each snippet of information spread across the whiteboard of her mind, like the boards she and Isobel used to draw up at Langley. Pieces of yarn, a different colour for each type of connection, stretched between them to form a vast web. Back then that web would help them to catch their suspect, but now it just formed a tangled mess, the only certainty that—if they didn't find a way to resolve it—she or her family would be the ones to find themselves caught.

She steeled her gaze on the coffee table. The clear line of the edge and the transparency of the glass felt taunting in comparison to the situation with Kostov. When she spoke, it was a murmur, more to herself than to Russell. "I've got to believe that they're going to help."

"Everyone needs to believe in something."

Her gaze flicked up to him. "What do you believe in?"

"That it's human nature to act in one's own self-interest." He studied the end of his tie and frowned at a speck that might or might not have existed. "We just have to hope that the Russians realise it's in their best interest to squeeze everything they can out of Volkov—" He paused and met her eye. "—figuratively rather than literally—" Then the look hazed. "…though I'm sure the two aren't mutually exclusive." He shrugged it off. "—and that they pass on the information, preferably before Kostov finds out your location."

She frowned. "I thought he already had it. If the shooter—"

"Avdonin says Dudnik didn't have the address, so he couldn't have passed it on to Volkov at that meeting at the hotel. Perhaps his task was to find out, before he got trigger-happy instead."

Her eyes narrowed on him. She spoke slowly. "So, you don't trust they'll pass on the information, but you do trust Avdonin when he says that?"

"I trust the fact that you're not currently dead." He flung a gesture towards her, and held her gaze for a long second, a laser burning the words onto her mind, before he rested his hand against the arm of the couch. "Assuming Kostov and his ilk are still intent on killing you, which we have good reason to believe they are, they've had more than enough time to put together a plan. Once he's got the opportunity, I wouldn't count on him squandering it."

"Well, that's reassuring." She gave him a smile buoyed with false cheer and then drowned it with a sip from her water bottle.

A pause settled over the room, like tendrils of mist infiltrating the air, then entwining and swelling to form an ever-shifting veil of fog.

Meanwhile, a frown dawned across Russell's brow. Light at first, just a murmur of thought, until it reached the tipping point of realisation and deepened along the exponential. The drumming of his fingers against the armrest stopped, and he looked to her. "Did you really think we'd leave you here if we thought you were at risk?"

"Depends." She took another sip. "How badly do you want me to be signed off?"

She held his gaze for a moment—a challenge—and then placed the water bottle down on the coffee table, next to the half-eaten carton of pasta. With her hands braced against the arms of the chair, she pushed herself to standing. The strain brought a mellow ache to her ribs.

"You know," Russell called after her as she ambled towards the window, "it's not the fact of you being here that'll get you signed off."

"How very Zen of you, Russell." She shot him a glance over her shoulder, and then came to a stop in front of the glass. The grey skies glowered down upon the car park, suspending the air with a twilight of gloom, whilst the branches of the black walnut tree continued to roll and lurch. The only thing that had changed was that the car parked nearest the window, an SUV similar to Henry's, had gone, leaving shallow wakes in the sea of gravel.

That morning, October 24th, she'd seen Kostov's car and thought it similar to the one she and Will had learnt to drive in. Something about it, the way it had crept along the street each time she went out for a run, had felt…_off_. The kind of queasy feeling you get when something's wrong, even though you can't quite place what; like entering your home to be hit by the certainty that someone else has been there, though not a single item has been disturbed. With Henry's insistence that she was just obsessing over Will, it was easy to dismiss the feeling, but perhaps if she'd gone with her gut and spoken up about it at the time, informed DS or the FBI, then she wouldn't be where she was now: staring out of the window of the clinic at a tree she couldn't quite be sure hadn't been plucked from her dream but couldn't bring herself to ask anyone about to check. And perhaps then a tiny, but not insignificant, part of her wouldn't be wishing that they _wouldn't_ catch Kostov, just so that she'd have an excuse to stay there—or at an actual safe house—so that she could avoid whatever awaited her at home.

Or maybe DS would have thought her crazy.

And maybe she was.

She'd never felt so unlike herself, yet so adamant she hadn't changed at all.

"You're doing it again." Russell's voice chided her.

"Doing what?"

"Thinking."

She folded her arms across her chest, her hands tucked into the ends of her sleeves, and another ache rippled out from her ribs, just as sweet as before. "What can I say? It's my fatal flaw."

"Emphasis on the 'fatal'," he muttered.

A leaden pause.

"Look…I know you're worried that people will treat you differently—"

She shook her head. "It's not just that."

"But if having a heart attack has taught me anything, apart from how much I hate broiled fish and kale, it's that most people's concern for you lasts about as long as a news cycle."

"Emphasis on the 'most people'."

"An insistence on keeping you alive that makes Captain Ahab look positively apathetic? It's the worst part of having a spouse… That, and in-laws… And having to attend functions that you don't give a damn about but can't avoid without being labeled as 'unsupportive', because God forbid you should have two minutes to yourself."

She twisted around. "Need to vent, Russell?"

"No… I'm good." He watched his fingers where they drummed against the armrest. _Da-rum, da-rum, da-rum. _Then they stilled, and he shot her a look. "Besides, women talk."

She drew back. "Well, that's ever so slightly sexist."

He gave a half-shrug. "With the added benefit of being true."

His gaze lingered on her for a moment. When it fell back to the arm of the couch, she returned to the window. The rhythmic _clunk-clunk-clunk_ of the clock above the door suspended them in that pause; though it beat out the seconds, with its sound isolated to the point of abstraction, it felt as though time in the room had slowed, whilst everything outside had stopped.

"For what it's worth—" Russell's voice dragged. "—my perception of you hasn't changed one bit. I still think you're a total nightmare and an unmitigated pain in the ass and I'm looking forward to the day when I no longer have to be concerned about you."

A smile lit Elizabeth's lips. She caught it in her reflection in the window, and as she did, it caused her focus to shift so that the black walnut tree faded into a blur and the gloom outside surrendered to the yellow light that dappled off the glass. It felt as though the words at once captured how things were before and how they were now. Snark and concern. Antagonism and friendship (…of a sort). A simultaneous display of both orientations of a Necker cube. Though it held at least one lie too.

She turned to him. "I think that might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Russell."

He nodded to her. No pause. "You're welcome."

Maybe some changes weren't so bad after all.

* * *

**3:04 PM**

"How are you feeling today?" Sat in the armchair opposite, Dr Sherman stretched down and propped the black ring binder against the foot of the chair. It was so crammed full of notes that the front and back that had once tapered towards one another now no longer touched. Permanently wedged apart. A separation forced by the reams that documented Elizabeth's thoughts.

"Today's been…" The tips of Elizabeth's thumbs rubbed along the rim of the coffee mug that she cradled in both hands whilst she sought the answer from the whitewashed walls. She'd given them enough of her thoughts; it was about time that they gave something back. Her gaze returned to Dr Sherman. "…a struggle."

Dr Sherman sank back in her seat. She clutched her hands loosely atop the navy blue notebook balanced in her lap. "Tell me about that."

"Well, it started with my…" Elizabeth paused. _Lawyer? Friend? Hatchet man?_ "…with Mike coming to visit."

"Amy mentioned." Dr Sherman's tone said far more than the two words ever could.

"Then you'll get the idea that meetings with him are normally a challenge enough in themselves, the kind that make dental extractions look appealing."

"But today was particularly difficult?"

"Yes." Elizabeth watched Dr Sherman over the rim of the mug as she took a sip. She held the swell of coffee in her mouth for a long moment, and allowed the richness to mellow and fade into bitter before she swallowed. Her gaze dipped away as she returned the mug to her lap. "He brought up the idea of going public with what's happened, not just the assassination attempt—attempt_s_—but the whole nervous breakdown, or whatever you want to call it, side of it too."

"And how do you feel about that?"

_Anxious, scared, ashamed, terrified, confused, panicked, like I'd rather go live with the aliens in the basement of the White House than ever publicly admit to this. At least they won't judge me… And they have access to Conrad's good coffee stash…_

She met Dr Sherman's eye. "Conflicted."

Dr Sherman prompted her with silence.

"I mean, I get that it's the right thing to do, politically speaking at least, and if it's going to come out eventually anyway, I'd rather get ahead of it. Not because of the optics or the narrative or whatever, but so that I feel like I have some control, like I'm owning it, rather than people thinking they can force it out of me or turn it into some dirty little secret."

When the pause lingered long into silence, the thin arches of Dr Sherman's eyebrows raised a touch. "But…?"

"But I don't want one group of people to beat me over the head with it—" Elizabeth held one hand out to the side, and then swept it in the opposite direction, so forcefully that the coffee in her other hand lurched and almost spilt. "—and another group of people to hold me up like I'm some kind of spokesperson for mental health, like I've been read in on some secret intel and I have all the answers, when in truth I really don't have a clue. I don't know what made me get like this, not really, and as I'm sure that file points out—" She gestured to the ring binder propped against the armchair. "—I certainly don't have the formula for getting better."

"People aren't looking for answers, not always."

"Then what?"

"Validation, connection, hope."

Elizabeth snorted. Her eyebrows arched whilst she stared through the coffee mug cradled against her knees. "Well, if anyone looked to me for any of that, I'd feel like a fraud and I think they'd be sorely disappointed."

"What makes you say that you'd feel like a fraud?"

"Other people have real struggles. Lifelong struggles. And it feels like I'm playing at it in comparison. I mean, at least half my problem was due to lack of sleep." She swept her hand towards the window behind Dr Sherman.

"Just because other people's struggles manifest in a different way or have a different aetiology doesn't mean that you can't struggle as well or that your struggles are any less serious. And as I said before, lack of sleep might be the cause of some things, but it's a symptom of others too." Perhaps Dr Sherman thought Elizabeth's gesture had been directed to the memory of their conversation from the first night she had come to the clinic, when they had walked together along the track.

Elizabeth didn't say otherwise.

In the lull, Dr Sherman's gaze bristled over her. Her lips parted as though she had something to say, but whatever it was, it needed further consideration before she could commit to saying it. "When you came here, it was because we had serious concerns for your well-being."

Elizabeth winced over a mouthful of coffee. "You mean the fact that I wanted to kill myself?"

To give her credit, Dr Sherman tried to keep her expression neutral despite the bluntness of the statement, but perhaps she wasn't used to working with ex-CIA analysts. She ventured a somewhat strained smile to compensate. "We haven't spoken much about that."

"We haven't." Elizabeth met her gaze, held it, and then eased up from the couch. The carpet fibres raked against her bare soles as she drifted towards the window, and as she passed the armchairs, she caught a breath of Dr Sherman's perfume—lavender wrapped in vanilla.

Under the ever-present stare of the black walnut tree, she stopped. She cradled the coffee mug to her chest, just close enough for its warmth to brush through the wash-worn cotton of her tee and kiss the bruise from the backface signature that drew a bullseye over her heart. The branches of the tree swirled in the breeze with all the grace of a plant suspended in water.

Maybe it really was in her head.

She turned her back on the window.

Dr Sherman had twisted around to watch her. One hand steadied her against the armrest.

"We haven't spoken about it." Elizabeth's fingers flexed around the coffee mug. "But that's what I'm going to have to do." She raised the mug to her lips. Then stopped. "And I think that's what worries me the most."

The bitter flood of coffee coated her tongue; it consumed all other scents.

The _clunk…clunk…clunk… _of the clock measured out Elizabeth's steps as she traipsed back to the couch. She slumped down onto the cushion and drew one knee up towards her chest; her toes curled into the leather as its chill prickled against her sole. "The thought of doing an interview doesn't thrill me, but I know that I'll get through it. After all, it won't be this big, heartfelt confession; it'll be carefully scripted, rehearsed to the nth degree, all vague allusions, nothing concrete, something superficial with the illusion of depth." She dismissed it with a shake of the head, and the ends of her hair tickled the line of her jaw.

Then she stilled. She held Dr Sherman's gaze. "But with my family…?"

She paused. Suspended.

Then her heart sank beneath the weight of the words and it dragged her gaze away with it. She stared down at the seam detail at the front edge of the cushion beneath her. "I can't just swan back in, make some vague comment about having 'been in a bad place' but everything's totally fine now, by the way, and I'm back but I expect us never to talk about it." She plucked idly at one of the white threads, trying loosen it, perhaps to free it. But it clung tight. "After everything I've put them through, I owe them more than that. But I don't know if I can give it to them. Or at least, not without changing the way they look at me…" Her eyebrows arched. "That is if they don't look at me differently already."

"You've struggled before, with flashbacks and panic attacks," Dr Sherman said. "Were you able to speak to your family about that?"

"Yes. A bit. But it didn't require much of an explanation, and it didn't change who I am."

"And you feel this does?"

Elizabeth's gaze darted up, and she stared Dr Sherman in the eye. Hard. Her hand cut through the air, an emphasis for each point. "Mom _has_ flashbacks, Mom _has_ panic attacks. Mom is still the same person." She paused, still staring at Dr Sherman, willing her to see it, needing her to see it.

But if Dr Sherman did see it, her expression didn't show it. Or anything else.

Elizabeth's hand fell back to the cushion, her gaze along with it, and she returned to plucking at the thread, a little more forcefully than before. "But Mom _is_ depressed, Mom _is_ suicidal…?" She let the words linger. It felt as though they swayed down through the air to settle on the carpet, smouldering debris of the person she once was. "How can I expect them to treat me the same when the very nature of the language we use redefines who I am?"

Their embers succumbed to the hush.

"To me, the whole PTSD aspect of it is easier to explain and easier to understand. Something bad happened to me, and now my memory behaves in a certain way. Cause and effect. That's not to say that the effects aren't significant, but it doesn't change who I am as a person. Flashbacks, panic attacks: they're something that happen _to_ me, they're something that I deal with. They affect me, but they remain separate from my sense of self." The thread gave a little and allowed her to ease the stub of her nail beneath it. "But the whole depression, suicide part of it…? Those thoughts came from _my _head, they were in _my_ voice, they were part of _me_. They _were_ my sense of self."

She stopped tugging at the thread and looked up at Dr Sherman. "How am I meant to explain that?" Her eyes widened. "Seriously?" She held up one hand, her fingers spiking the air. "_I am large, I contain multitudes_…" Then her fingers withered to her palm, and her voice deflated in sync. "…and some of them you might not like so much."

The words were absorbed into the silence.

She let her foot slip down from the cushion, and she hunched forward, her elbows propped to her thighs, the coffee mug cradled in the space between her knees. She stared straight at Dr Sherman. "How are you meant to tell your children that you thought they'd be better off without you? How are you meant to tell them that you got to a place where you'd rather be dead than be around to see them graduate, get married, have children of their own? How are you meant to tell them that that state of mind existed inside of you and it felt as real and compelling as your rational mind does right now? How are you meant to reassure them that it won't happen again?" Her voice quietened, yet retained all of its grit. "How can you ever expect them to trust you after you betrayed them like that?"

She swallowed, her throat tight, and as she lowered her gaze to the coffee cup, she shook her head to herself, the slightest of movements. "I remember how they were after Henry's father took his own life, how hurt they were. It's like they thought they weren't enough for him, that perhaps if he loved them more, then he wouldn't have done it. What's scary is that when you're thinking like that, doing that—ending it—almost feels like an act of love, a kindness, like you're ridding them of a burden." She raised her eyebrows. "Of course you're not, you're just burdening with something far worse—" Another shake of the head. "—but at the time it doesn't feel like that."

She took a breath, and then tried to sigh it out, but it sat heavy in her chest. Her own burden.

She returned to plucking at the thread. "How can I explain all that to them, to put that into words, and still expect them to see me as me, as their mother?"

Silence.

Then—

"I think you just did."

The thread snapped free. Elizabeth stopped. She looked up.

Dr Sherman met her with a soft smile that looked more like a shrug.

Elizabeth frowned. "You can't seriously think I should say any of that."

"Why not?"

"Because." Her eyes bugged.

Dr Sherman leant forward in the armchair, and mirrored Elizabeth's stance. The silver chain of her necklace swayed away from her throat and caught a shimmer of the light, and she held her hands clasped atop the notebook in her lap, her biro jutting from between them. "I can't promise you that their perception of you won't change, no more than I can control anyone else's thoughts, but if you give them the truth the best way you can, if you're patient with them, if you take the time to acknowledge their concerns and their own struggles with this and how it's affected them, then you can rebuild that trust."

"Or I can just amp up the crazy—" Elizabeth's eyes remained wide and she motioned at the side of her head. "—and destroy any hope of them ever trusting me again."

Dr Sherman considered her for a moment. Then she drew back a little, so that she was no longer hunched forward, though her spine remained less than upright. She propped her elbows against the armrests, her hands connected by the bridge of the pen that she held between them. "Do you know how much insight you've just shown into your own thoughts?"

Elizabeth huffed. "So, my thoughts might be crazy, but at least I know that they're crazy?"

She shook her head to herself, and then took a swig of coffee. _So not the reassurance she was looking for. _Though what that reassurance would look like, she didn't know. Could it be that she just wanted validation of her fears so that she'd feel justified to wallow in them?

Dr Sherman continued as though Elizabeth hadn't spoken. "It's that acknowledgment that will show your children that yes, maybe you were struggling for a time and that's what led to you coming here, but that you've found a way through it. And that insight also creates a separation between you—the real you—and those thoughts. By recognising the thoughts, they can become part of a mood that you experience rather than a part of yourself. Then they're something that you _have_—or had—" She arched her eyebrows at Elizabeth and waited.

Elizabeth listened for a moment to make sure that a voice wouldn't snake out of the darkness.

Nothing.

Then she gave a tentative nod.

Dr Sherman continued, "—rather than something that you _are_."

Elizabeth eyed Dr Sherman. The argument was tempting. The gap created by her own insight was no wider than that between the leather cushion and its stitch, yet it was enough to hook a nail under and pry the thoughts away from herself.

But did it make sense, or did she just want it—need it—to make sense? Even at the time, she'd had moments when she'd been able to distinguish herself from those thoughts. It hadn't made them any less real though, or their arguments any less compelling, and once they swept her up again, she lost all sense of herself until it felt as though the only glimpses came in those sudden gasps of breath, when—just for a second—she could hold her head above the water.

"I've never met your children, but from what you've told me about them, they sound like smart, compassionate individuals, and you have a good relationship with each of them. I'm sure they'll have their questions and they might be a little wary at first, but if you can be as open with them as you have been with me, I think they'll see that you're still the same person." Dr Sherman raised her shoulders in a small shrug. "Perhaps their perception of you will always be a little different from what it was before, or perhaps—as the memory of this fades—it won't."

"So, what?" Elizabeth said. "Honesty, patience and time?"

Dr Sherman's lips quirked. "It's as good a formula as any."

Elizabeth sank back against the cushions and drew her leg up towards her chest once more. With her focus soft, the black walnut tree hung like a shadow beyond the window, obscured by the reflection of the lights in the glass. Maybe the kids would get it, and maybe with time she'd be able to prove to them that she was the same person as before. After all, though those thoughts might have been what led to her coming to the clinic, along with the promise of sleeping pills, they didn't plague her anymore. They'd see that, surely.

Or maybe she'd crossed a line, opened their eyes to a new perspective of her, one they wouldn't be able to un-see, and they'd never fully be able to trust that the same thing wouldn't happen again. Whether they wanted it to or not, that fear would always lurk at the edge of their vision, a shadow that hung between her and them.

But _honesty, patience, time_…? She'd give them that, and anything else they asked for. And she'd hold on to the hope that her fear of their response was just that: a fear, nothing more.

A steel grey hatchback trundled along the track towards the clinic. Its headlights bounced with each dip and bump in the road. The yellow light cut a haze through the gloom outside and then flooded sharp through the window as the car sailed past the black walnut tree and arced into one of the bays. With the coffee mug clutched in both hands and cradled towards the middle of her chest, Elizabeth rubbed her fingertip against the bare skin of her ring finger.

_"__So, the vivid dreams, the going out running at ridiculous hours, the spying on our neighbours and obsessing about their cars—"_

_"__I'm your wife, Henry. Your wife. Not your patient, not your case subject, and certainly not some responsibility you have to deal with."_

The car door clunked open, and a man climbed out. He slammed the door shut, and then opened the backseat and held out his hand as a girl—maybe seven, eight years old—in ripped dungarees, ribbon-straggling pigtails, and grey cable knit tights jumped down from her booster seat.

"Elizabeth?" Dr Sherman's voice nudged Elizabeth out of her thoughts.

A second _thunk_ rang out, followed by the _scrunch_ and skip of footsteps over the gravel

Elizabeth stopped rubbing her ring finger, and her gaze sharpened on Dr Sherman. "Even if everything's fine with the kids and I'm just projecting, it doesn't change the fact that I don't know what to do about Henry."

Dr Sherman's brow gathered into a frown. "How do you mean?"

Elizabeth stooped forward in the seat. The balls of her feet pressed to the floor whilst her heels raised away from the carpet. She held the mug between her knees, her hands forming a loose cradle, and as she spoke, she stared down into the coffee, whilst the lights overhead reflected in yellow-white glints off the surface. "Henry feels this need to protect me. It's been like that pretty much since day one. That's just who he is." She paused. "Maybe there's a touch of 'broken orphan' syndrome there too…" She dismissed the thought with a shake of the head. "I don't know. But I know that I love him for it.

"It was difficult at first. I'd been so used to having to look after myself that I had to learn to relinquish that control and let him take care of me. It was scary too. I didn't want to get used to depending on him only for something to happen and for me to end up on my own again. But I admit that when I did let him in, there was something appealing about it as well. Comforting. I'd forgotten what that was like." The whisper of a smile lifted the corners of her lips. "He made me feel safe and supported and cherished. He still does."

The smile dwindled. "Most of the time.

"But sometimes that need to protect me becomes…" Her chest tightened with the pause in breath that came as she searched for the right word. "—overbearing."

She sipped from her coffee and then returned the mug to its sling. "It won't surprise you to learn that what happened in Iran wasn't the first time that he nearly lost me. There've been a few close calls—I'm sure Henry would have a different term for them—and each time something's happened, it's sent that need to protect me into overdrive. He means well. He loves me. He wants to keep me safe. But that's the thing. He's not my keeper, and it can feel so…stifling.

"It makes me feel like less than his equal. Especially when it's one rule for him and another for me. When something happens to him, I'm meant to just suck up my fears about his safety and get on with it. He gets shot, he gets radiation poisoning, he struggles with guilt over what happened to his asset, and I'm meant to keep my concerns to myself and let him go about life as normal. But something happens to me—or nearly happens to me—in the CIA and I'm meant to quit, or I struggle to come to terms with what happened in Iran and it's straight to the shrink you go—" She shot Dr Sherman a look. "—no offence."

Dr Sherman conceded that with a soft smile.

Elizabeth's gaze settled on the surface of the coffee again. "Maybe that's just a guy thing and it shouldn't bother me. But it does."

Another sip. Full-bodied bitterness billowed over her tongue. "Our relationship works because we trust each other, we respect each other, and we treat each other as equals. But being wrapped in cotton wool or being pressured into decisions just to allay his fears doesn't make me feel like his equal. It makes me feel like I have to give up part of myself in order to appease his need to protect me. Either that or hold my ground and risk a rift coming between us.

"It creates conflict. And either I give in to him, or with time he sees that I'm fine and that I'm no longer at immediate risk and his fears quieten. But they continue to simmer away in the background only to crop up again and again in arguments or at times of stress."

She looked up at Dr Sherman, and held her gaze. "When I go home, I'm going to need him to support me. I'll need him to help me manage my triggers, I'll need him to act as my backstop and keep me in check. But I want to be able to do that as his partner, as his equal, not his charge, not someone he feels bound to protect. I don't want it to become this power struggle and for it to come between us. I need to be able to lean on him without him taking control."

Her gaze dipped away again, to the round glass vase that sat in the middle of the coffee table that stood between the armchairs and the couch. "But it's complicated." A pause. "In those other situations, he could see that I was okay, he could see that I wasn't taking unnecessary risks. But with this… It's all to do with what's going on inside my head. It's the need to protect me from my thoughts, whether they're part of myself or not." She turned her head from side to side, and set the ends of her hair quivering. "Sure, he'll be able to gauge my mood from my behaviour to a certain extent, but at the end of the day, he's going to have to trust me when I tell him that I'm okay." She stilled. Her heart ached. "And after this, I don't know if that trust will be there."

_When you said that you 'should be dead', you didn't mean…you weren't trying to tell me that you _want_ to be dead…right?_

Her grip on the coffee mug tightened. She took a swig and forced down a gulp, but her throat closed around it and caused her to grimace. "I saw the look in his eyes when he realised what I was trying to tell him, when he realised how bad it was. That fear. No. That _terror_."

_Tell me that I'm wrong. Please tell me that I'm wrong._

"That's something that's never going to go away. Sure, it might fade, but there'll always be this niggling doubt. _Is she telling me the truth? Is she really okay? What if she's thinking '_x, y, z'_?_"

She stared Dr Sherman in the eye. "I don't want him second-guessing me. I don't want him doubting me. I don't want him trying to analyse what's going on in my head. But there's no piece of paper in the world that will prove to him that I'm okay and that he can let his guard down, so there'll always be this niggling fear that the same thing might happen again." Her eyes widened. "Or worse."

She paused, fixing that thought, and then slumped back against the cushions and pinched the bridge of her nose. The chill of the leather pressed through her cardigan and tee. "But I don't want to live the rest of my life feeling like he's monitoring me, and I don't want him to live the rest of his life feeling like he has to." She held her hand up to the side, her fingers splayed. "I need him to trust me and know that I'll tell him if I'm not okay, and I need to know that I can trust him to tell me when I think I'm okay but I'm really not."

Her hand drifted down and returned to clutching the coffee mug. She eased forward into a hunch again and met Dr Sherman's eye. Something far deeper than her bruises ached through her chest. "I know that I'm the one who's burdened him with these fears, and I wish that I hadn't, but now I need him to work _with_ me. I need him to be my husband, my partner, my equal. I need him to know that I'm still his wife."

Silence stiffened the air. It muffled the _clunk-clunk-clunk_ of the clock.

Dr Sherman stared straight back at Elizabeth, almost expectant. She sat with her shoulders rounded forward slightly, her hands folded neatly atop the notebook in her lap, the biro lying at a diagonal and trapped beneath them. The rumour of a smile broke through her nude lipstick.

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. "You're just going to tell me that everything I've just said, I need to say to him…aren't you?"

Dr Sherman gave a huff of a laugh. "You're getting the hang of this." Her smile softened again, though the laugh lingered on in her eyes. "It will be a balancing act. You'll need to find a way to talk to Henry and to voice your needs while being respectful of his fears. It's not uncommon for partners to be wary at first after a residential stay like this, but with time, he'll see that you're doing well and that you're able to cope, and you'll soon settle into a new kind of normal." The corners of her lips turned downwards as she gave a small shrug. "Perhaps his threshold for concern will always be a little lower than before and he'll worry if he thinks you're missing sleep or if you seem a bit down, but it'll be up to the two of you to communicate with one another and establish boundaries so that you both know what a reasonable level of concern is. That way Henry can support you, and he'll know at what point he needs to step in and say something, without you feeling like you're being monitored or overprotected." The ends of her chestnut hair swayed against the collar of her shirt as she shook her head. "Don't expect to get it right from day one. Often there's a honeymoon period to begin with, and the real work comes when you meet that first challenge—" She stilled. "—but if you can be open with each other and mindful of each other's needs and concerns, you'll find a way to work out the kinks."

"Wow." The word left Elizabeth in a drawn out breath—heavy on the sarcasm, though the derision was aimed at herself. "So, you mean I'll actually have to talk to my husband?"

Dr Sherman's smile widened. "A novel idea, I know." Some of the lightness dwindled from her expression, and it left the look a touch tentative. "Have you spoken to him at all?"

Elizabeth's gaze dipped to the coffee. "No. Not yet." She distracted herself with another sip.

But Dr Sherman's look of—_Why not?_—persisted.

Elizabeth forced herself to meet Dr Sherman's eye. She wasn't avoiding, if that's what Dr Sherman thought. "I don't want him to worry about me, especially when I have a bad day and it seems like I'm back to square one. And I already miss him and the kids—calling him will just make me miss them even more. And I really don't want to be the woman sat in the office crying down the phone to her husband, especially not when there's always someone in there monitoring my calls." She swept one hand towards the door, let it hang in the air for a moment, and then lowered it back to the coffee cup. Her chin dipped too. "Plus, nervous breakdown doesn't exactly scream 'sexy'…" Her eyebrows raised a fraction as she lingered over that thought.

She looked up at Dr Sherman again. "I just want to get my thoughts straight first, figure out exactly what I want to say and how I need to say it, so it doesn't sound like I don't appreciate him or that I'm trying to push him away. And I'd rather talk to him face to face… Or not exactly face to face because face to face is awkward, but in the same room at least."

Dr Sherman studied her. Then she opened up the notebook in her lap using the navy blue ribbon that snaked out from between its pages, uncapped the biro and jotted down a note. "I'd like you to start thinking about it as part of your homework."

Elizabeth settled back against the cushions. Homework or not, no doubt she'd be thinking about it. Churning it over, along with everything else. "I suppose it's all a bit cart before the horse anyway. I haven't even been signed off."

Dr Sherman stopped writing and looked up at Elizabeth. "Do you know what you did today?"

"Worried over nothing, and then worried some more?"

Dr Sherman eased into a smile. "They're perfectly natural concerns, so I wouldn't say it's over nothing. No, what I meant was you found today a struggle, but you recognised that and you reached out."

"So, the takeaway is: things suck right now, but at least I'm talking about how much they suck." Elizabeth held Dr Sherman's gaze over the brim of the mug as she drew in a long sip.

"It's progress," Dr Sherman said. "And, to me, that shows it isn't cart before the horse."

Elizabeth stopped, the swell coffee still held in her mouth. She replayed the words in her mind, analysed them, waited for Dr Sherman to take them back. But when Dr Sherman just met her with that steady smile, she forced herself to swallow. One step at a time. Towards the unknown. Towards a new kind of normal. Towards home?

Her chest tightened. "I don't know if I'm ready yet."

"Then it's definitely not cart before the horse."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	71. Chapter Sixty-Nine: a disconnect

**Chapter Sixty-Nine**

**…****a disconnect.**

**Henry**

**1:27 PM**

_'__The only distraction here is you_.'

There was a disconnect. The _scrunch, scrunch, scrunch_ of the gravel lagged half a second or so behind the trudge of Henry's footsteps as he strode away from the entrance of the clinic and across the car park towards the SUV that he'd half parked, half abandoned in the bay nearest the window. It felt as though the whole world had been thrust out of sync—stopped for a moment, and now straining to catch up. Meanwhile, his mind continued to race at whirlwind speed; snatches of thought whipped around, sharp in the moment before being wrested away again and then fading into the incomprehensible. Was it wrong to want to help her? Was it selfish? Was it arrogant?

He came to a stop outside the window. He wouldn't have been surprised had Russell stormed straight in there and wrenched down the blind, as unsubtle as that might have been. Anything to eliminate the threat…distraction…maybe both. But the yellow warmth of the lights still flowed out and blurred into the grey-tinged air that swathed the world outside.

On the other side of the glass, Elizabeth stood with her back to him, her cardigan huddled around her; it made her seem smaller somehow, as though half her weight came from the chunky-knit wool. This was the closest they'd been to one another in weeks. No more than three strides stood between them. Yet those three strides stretched until they might as well have been continents apart.

Would it really be so bad for her to see him? Would it really cause her to worry that much? How could it possibly hurt to remind her that she was loved? So loved.

Elizabeth turned towards the window. The light shimmered off her hair.

Henry's heart froze. Rather than hope, and a mild satisfaction at having thwarted Russell's plan to push the pasta to the opposite side of the coffee table so that she'd be sat with her back to the glass, oblivious to the fact that her husband stood just beyond, a chill of dread hit him instead. What if it was that bad? What if it did set her back? What if she didn't want to see him at all? Russell's words had stung, but if she herself turned him away, that would redefine 'hurt'.

And if she didn't turn him away but wanted to speak to him instead? What could he say?

_I came here because I thought you weren't taking this seriously. I came here because I didn't believe that you were focusing on yourself. I came here because I didn't trust you._

"Bess." Russell's bark reached through the glass.

Elizabeth snapped around to face Russell. A long pause. An exchange of words, too soft to discern. Then she padded across the carpet, her cardigan still hugged around her, and sank down into the armchair. Her body collapsed into it like a sigh.

Henry's body sighed too. It felt like in barking her name, Russell had yanked him out of the path of an oncoming truck. As much as he wanted to hold her, touch her, breathe her in after weeks of nothing but the dwindling scent that teased every breath at home, maybe she would get hurt. In which case Russell was right: maybe the best thing he could do was to leave.

He didn't though.

He tried to.

He made it as far as climbing into the car and pulling the door to with a _thud_.

But the question hung over him, posed by his own niggling thoughts: Did he trust her?

* * *

**Wednesday, 17th October, 2018**

**9:07 PM**

It turned out there was no need for Henry to ask how the conversation had gone with Will, not when Elizabeth stormed into their bedroom.

"You know what the first thing he said to me was?" Elizabeth tossed her cell phone down onto the bench at the end of their bed. It bounced once, flipped over and landed screen-side down.

Henry slipped the bookmark between the curled-edged pages of Aristotle's _Parva Naturalia_, somewhere around 449b, and placed it down on the glass-topped accent table between the chaise longue where he sat and the bookshelf behind. It had been more of a prop anyway, a distraction to pass the time before the fireworks began.

With one hand steadying her against the mahogany dresser just inside the door, she lifted her foot, yanked off one black patent high heel and flung it towards the closet. "'_Last time you made me eat street meat._'" The shoe hit the wall instead, a loud _clunk_ before it clattered to the floorboards. "Anyone would think I'd given him food poisoning, for crying out loud."

"You did once."

She stopped. She stared at him. The other shoe now held in her hand.

"Remember that 'mushroom risotto'?" A chuckle escaped him.

With the look she gave him, the shoe now bore striking resemblance to a grenade. Her eyebrows raised a fraction. "Seriously, Henry? Air quotes?"

"Come on, babe. It was crunchy and soggy all at once."

Her eyes narrowed on him. No. Not a grenade. A bludgeon.

The brief burst of mirth faded. His mouth opened. A long pause. Perhaps silence should have been his policy a few seconds ago; maybe then his chest wouldn't now be deflating with the realisation: "You're going to withhold sex again, aren't you?"

"Criticising my cooking?" She tossed the shoe somewhere in the vicinity of the other, and then met him with a smile that definitely was not a smile. "Gotta say, not a turn on."

He floundered. _Think fast._ "I think you're phenomenally talented in your inability to cook."

"Stop digging a hole, Henry." Her voice was half sing-song as she strode past him and towards the vanity table, her bare feet thumping off the floorboards. The soft yellow glow of the street lamps pressed through the net curtains of the windows on either side.

He twisted around to follow her. His palms had started to sweat against his joggers. _Take it back. Say something. Anything_. "…I love you?"

She shot him a look over her shoulder as she unfastened her earring.

His heart sank further. _You're not above begging. _"Please don't leave me."

She held the look for a moment longer, whilst she unfastened the opposite earring.

If he had to guess, he'd say that she didn't view the notion entirely unfavourably.

The earrings dropped into the ceramic jewellery dish with a clink. She sauntered over, came to a stop in front of him, and then placed her hands against his shoulders. The touch tingled both cold and warm through the thin cotton of his tee. The ghost of a shiver.

She leant in. A waft of her perfume, the sweet scent of jasmine, rolled over him. Her breath ruffled against his cheek. "But if I did that…who'd I have to feed me?"

She drew back slightly, and met him with arched eyebrows.

He caught the glint in her eyes, and a smile lifted the corner of his lips. A blossom of relief. He gave a small shrug. "Rumour has it the chefs at the White House are pretty good."

It was meant to be a joke, or not a joke, but light-hearted at least. But she bristled and the glint in her eyes dimmed. "Yeah, well, we'll see."

The cell phone buzzed and blared against the bench. A text. She stepped away and stooped over to snatch it up. "Ugh… It's Jay. If this is about the Russians _ah-gain_, I swear to God—"

"Babe, just leave it. You've worked late every night for the past week."

"It doesn't work like that, Henry."

"You need to slow down." He pushed himself up from the chaise longue, plucked the phone from her hand, and tossed it onto the bed. It flumphed a soft crater into the floral throw.

"Henry—"

"They can survive without you for a few hours." He pawed at her hips and pulled her towards the seat. "Come here."

She humphed, but made no real effort to resist. "You're so going to regret that if it turns out they've invaded Alaska."

He chuckled. "One less state on the campaign trail."

The cushion dipped in front of him as she sank into the space between his thighs. "Not sure it works like that either."

He smoothed his palms over her upper arms, and relished the soft warmth that radiated through the silk of her blouse. It felt like this was the first time she'd paused for more than a heartbeat in the past few weeks. He massaged her shoulders and his thumbs dug deep to work out the knots, but rather than relaxing into the touch as she would normally, her spine remained rigid, her muscles tight, as though she were clinging to the knots, afraid of what would happen if she were to let go.

"Do you need to talk?" He kept his voice low. An offer, no expectation.

"What?" Her shoulders tensed further as she twisted around to throw him a look. "About the fact that I can't spend five minutes talking on the phone to my brother without him having a go at me, or about the fact that according to the last text I got from Sophie, she and Annie have gone to London and for some unfathomable reason he's decided to stay here rather than doing what any normal person would do and go with them?" She thrust her fingers into the air. "I mean, I moved heaven and earth to get him that job just so that he could be here with his family, and it's like he's hell-bent on throwing it all away." She swept her hand in an arc across the room, as though dashing aside the diorama of the perfect family.

"You can lead a horse to water—"

Her head whipped around, and she cut him a sharp look. "If you finish that sentence, you _will_ find yourself in a stint of involuntary celibacy."

He refrained from pointing out the many, _many_ flaws in that threat, and refocused his attention on her knots instead. "I'm just saying, babe… He's an adult."

She snorted. "Stevie and Alison are adults, should I no longer care about them?"

He paused and gave her an incredulous look, grateful that with her back to him and with her once again staring out towards the bedroom door that she couldn't see it. "You know that's not the same."

_Telling, though._

She shook her head. The ends of her hair tickled the backs of his hands without even brushing the skin. "I just want him to be happy. And it would be nice if he'd act like a normal human being for a change. I mean, you'd think that he of all people would get how important it is for him to be there for Annie."

He studied her. Not the soft shimmer of light on her hair, nor the way her thumb snuck beneath her first two fingers to rub against her wedding ring, nor the tension that kept her shoulders from relaxing beneath his touch and permanently raised as though they were pulled up by invisible strings, but the sense that she exuded, as though something about her were tinged with grey.

He knew better than to press her on it though. Best to let her brood for a while, to share in her own time. "You know that I'm always here if you need me."

"I do know. And I'm grateful." A half-glance. "Even if you make cracks about my cooking."

Rather than turning away again as he expected, she held his gaze.

A pause.

Something in the air changed. A frisson of static that brushed against his skin.

She twisted around fully, causing his hands to fall away from her shoulders and come to settle on her waist as she knelt against the cushion in front of him. The chain of her necklace—a gold as warm as her skin—swayed away from her chest and lured the eye towards the deep V of her blouse.

There was a reason why he loved a drop necklace.

He remained a gentleman though, and drank in her eyes instead. He'd like to say that they were as bright as ever, but the grey had seeped into them too. Skies on an overcast day.

Her fingertips drew swirls over his scalp as she held his gaze, and as he held her gaze, his thumbs drew circles over her lower ribs. The silence that passed between them felt like that moment of surrender before one succumbs to a soundless sleep. Uncomplicated and sweet.

He turned his face to the side and pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. His gaze strained to stay locked on hers. Anything to hold onto the moment while it lasted.

Her breath hitched on the inhale. Then her gaze dipped, she shook her head, and her hair quivered in a way that made him want to reach out and tuck it behind her ear before kissing the curve of her jaw. "I'm sorry that things have been hectic recently, and if I've been a bit Type A."

His expression held steady though his mind scrambled beneath. _How to say that she's always been a bit Type A, and more than a bit recently?_ He gave a small shrug. "It's the life we signed up for, and no matter what, you're always my type."

She laughed. "Nicely handled there, captain."

He conceded that with a smirk. "So, when are you meeting him?"

"Next Wednesday. So you can go ahead and block out time for the debrief."

He said nothing, but made a mental note to keep his schedule light that afternoon and empty that evening, just in case. _God only knows what the aftermath will be like this time next week._

The phone buzzed and bleeped from its crater in the centre of their bed. Another text.

Her shoulders slumped with a sigh. Deflated. She twisted around and stared at the phone; it looked as though she were waiting to see whether or not it would take the message back. When it didn't, she muttered, "It's the nightmare that keeps on giving."

"Work or Will?"

"Hah." She turned back to face him, clutched his head in both hands and pressed a kiss to the top—making it impossible for him to remain a gentleman and keep his gaze from plunging into the depths of the V. Then she met his eye for one second, her look razor-sharp. "Both."

She patted his cheek, and then drew away and scrambled onto the bench at the end of their bed. She leant over the mattress, walked her hands forward, and snatched up her cell phone.

His gaze followed, made it just far enough to appreciate the cut of her dress pants. _Who was he kidding, he'd never been a gentleman anyway_.

With the phone grasped in both hands, she knelt up on the bench, her back to him. "It's Jay. Again." Her voice lowered. "And you think _I'm _Type A…"

"Tell you what…" He pushed himself up from the chaise longue, and then standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her cheek. The band of his arms tightened until she arched into him, and with his lips brushing against her ear, he murmured, "You go save Alaska, and then when you're done, I'll present you with my argument as to why you don't ever want to consign me to celibacy."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Oh really?"

"It'll be very convincing." He pressed up against her. "I promise."

She gave snort of laughter that reverberated through his chest. A mellow buzz. It made his heart lighter somehow.

But then he frowned. His grip on her loosened and his hands slid down to hold her hips. "Unless you need to vent about Will, because, babe, I gotta say, as much as I love your brother, I'd rather we didn't end up talking about him while I'm in the middle of making my argument."

He didn't feel the need to add the '_again_'.

"That not do it for you, huh?"

His frown deepened. "I hope to God it doesn't do it for you."

She jabbed him in the ribs.

"Ow." He recoiled.

She twisted around on the bench, still kneeling. Her expression softened, and she looked down into his eyes and toyed with the hair at his nape. "I'm okay." She tilted her head to the side and leant back slightly so that her hips arched towards him. "Possibly working my way towards a stomach ulcer—" She returned her gaze to his, and a smile lightened her lips. "—but okay."

He massaged circles through her silk blouse as he clung to her waist, and he sought out the ill-defined haze that had brought a hint of grey to her eyes only moments before, but it eluded him, like trying to catch wisps of smoke only to see them slip through his fingers and fade into nothing. It was almost like it had never been there at all. "You sure?"

She nodded. "Really." Her eyes locked on his. The world turned blue. "Trust me?"

He gave her a soft smile. "Always."

When she returned later that evening, he gave a very convincing argument, if her rebuttal was anything to go by, and he fully intended to indulge in the smug satisfaction of that when he awoke with a smile the next morning. He stretched and a delicious ache spread through his limbs before it yielded. Then he rolled over to wait for her to stir (and possibly curse) at the alarm.

But the sheets were cold and empty.

And, as it turned out, that would be only the first morning of many.

_Just work_, she insisted. Unspoken: _Trust me._

Implicit: _Always._

* * *

**Present Day**

**1:31 PM**

Beyond the glass, with her back to the window, Elizabeth hunched forward in the armchair and cradled the pale yellow carton in one hand whilst she lifted forkfuls of the pasta to her lips.

The yellow light that escaped the room made the day outside dimmer somehow. Nowhere more so than in the car where Henry sat and watched her. The question hung over him like his own personal thundercloud: Did he trust her?

_Always_. The response came like an instinct. As seamlessly as one breath followed the other. A rise and fall that went unnoticed yet carried him throughout the day. Trust was something that just was. It was the top step of the staircase. Something you never considered until you found it wasn't there, and when you found it wasn't there, it hit you with a lurch and it left you reeling.

He had reeled that morning, when he'd found out that she'd called into the office, that she'd assisted the investigation after swearing to him time and time again that she remembered nothing, that she'd somehow wound up in the position to be shot—bulletproof vest or not—when she was meant to be focusing on therapy.

So, the question came again: Did he trust her?

But the more he thought about it and grappled for an answer like he was tumbling through a tailspin, like he had forgotten that he needed to PARE, and like the answer alone held the key to recovery, the more nebulous the question became. Trust. A word repeated into obscurity.

_What did trust even mean?_ The ethics professor in him gave the response he'd look for from his students in a seminar, after a protracted debate about whether honesty was always a necessity: It was the belief that someone held your best interests at heart. It was the belief that you could make yourself vulnerable to a person and that they wouldn't hurt you, or at least not intentionally.

_Did she hold his best interests at heart?_ The problem with that question was that his definition and her definition of 'acting in the best interests' might not be quite the same. Russell had said that she put herself in a position to be shot because she feared the assassin might come after him and their family. That was her acting in his best interests, putting herself at risk for the sake of their safety. But, to him, nothing about it would be in his best interests had she wound up dead and had he been forced to face life without her—not just hypothetically.

So the question of best interests wasn't helpful, not when it failed to take into account the different wants, needs, values, histories, beliefs of each party.

On to the second part of the definition: _Did he believe that she'd ever hurt him intentionally?_ No. But that didn't mean she wouldn't hurt him all the same. She had pushed him away, she had shouted at him, she had hidden the truth of her thoughts from him, for a brief moment she had blamed him, each night she had left him, even if she stayed _she_ had left him, she had shared thoughts that were incomprehensible to him, she had told him that she had lied to him, she had left him, she had asked people not to talk to him, she had chosen not to call him, she had confided in people who weren't him, she had left him. Emotionally, mentally, physically, she had left him. In so many ways she had hurt him. None of it intentional, though. And perhaps some of it was intended to protect him. But it didn't mean it hadn't hurt him, and it didn't mean he wouldn't be hurt again.

So, did he trust her?

With his life? — Without hesitation.

With her life? — …

Perhaps that was the problem.

Fear clouded everything.

Fear could make you forget how to breathe.

What if she didn't get better? What if she did get better only for something to happen that led her to feeling the same way again? What if next time, as hard as she tried, she couldn't find a way to break through and open up to him?

Could he trust her—his Elizabeth—and still fear that this struggle might permanently take her away from him?

Yes.

But it terrified him.

She had stayed at the clinic, she was eating the pasta, she was talking, even if right now she wouldn't (or maybe couldn't) talk to him. That meant she was trying. She was still fighting. She hadn't given in. He could trust that she would do all that she could to come back to him.

But so much of it wasn't under her control. Moods were the storm that you didn't see coming. You could learn the theory of how to fly through them, but that didn't mean you wouldn't lose your way when you found yourself engulfed in them.

He was wrong before: She, Elizabeth, hadn't done anything to hurt him. It was this situation, this struggle, that had hurt him. And perhaps what hurt the most, more than the fear of losing her, was that it had made him doubt her, doubt himself, doubt the trust they had built between them.

_Trust me._

There had been a simplicity to that 'always', an effortlessness akin to the breath.

And this struggle had taken that away from him.

Trust is the top step of the staircase; you can't know if it's there unless you start climbing.

Did he trust her?

Yes.

But it didn't free him from his fear of falling.

* * *

**1:36 PM**

The spectral trunks of the paper birches passed in flashes as the car ground its way over the gravel track and trundled towards the blunt-tipped arrows of the gates—one moment a line of solid white at the edge of Henry's vision, the next a blur that streaked away and disappeared into the distance behind him. He fought to keep his gaze on the road ahead, but his eyes strained against him, desperate for another glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror.

_She was safe, she was trying, she would come back to them_.

The words felt hollow, a mantra without meaning. Yet they were the same words he'd parroted to the kids for the past few weeks. No wonder Alison found no comfort in them. No wonder Stevie struggled to trust in them. No wonder Jason met them with derision. To have his faith in those words not just shaken but obliterated felt like waking up to find that the sky was a brilliant shade of vermilion, and apparently always had been; the blue was just an illusion. It left him disorientated and questioning everything.

…And he might possibly have lost himself in that disorientation.

Perhaps Russell wasn't wrong when he'd said that he needed to pull himself together. Not that he'd ever admit that to him. Being confronted with his own doubts and fears gave him a new appreciation of the kids' fears and frustrations. And him losing himself over this certainly wouldn't help them. Perhaps the most he could do for Elizabeth right now was to look after them, to make sure everything was all right at home so that she wouldn't feel guilty for leaving them.

But that was the problem. Guilt.

The glimpses of memory came like strobes of sunlight through the tree trunks.

Elizabeth, drenched in moonlight and darkness in the blue-black midnight of their bedroom, her hand held up in a star to push him back, but her fingers trembling, whilst a tear spilled down her cheek. _The people I love get hurt, Henry, they die, and it's my fault._

Elizabeth, sat on the dingy turquoise couch of the family room, illuminated by the bar of light that snuck through window in the door, one leg folded in front of her whilst her hand flailed as she yelled at him, _If it weren't for me, he wouldn't have been in the country, let alone in the restaurant._

Russell, in the reception of the clinic, his expression fixed in a snarl whilst his chest still heaved over each breath in the pause that lingered after rounding on him. _Now, if you're quite finished, I've left your wife alone in a room with a tray of pasta, the same pasta someone used to poison her and her brother_.

Elizabeth, stood next to Will's bed on the ICU, swamped in the thick wool of her cardigan, one hand clutching her hip, the other gripping her neck, whilst an agitation jittered beneath her every movement. _If only I hadn't given him my food…_

The car slowed through the grey stone pillars of the gates and sailed between the two black SUVs that were parked on the grassy verge on either side. The _clink-clunk, clink-clunk, clink-clunk_ of the indicator sharpened the surrounding silence; it grated against Henry's nerves, and caused the back of his neck to tighten. It wouldn't surprise him to learn that Elizabeth had remembered everything from the very beginning, but then again, it wouldn't surprise him right now if the rucks of slate grey cloud that loomed overhead cleared to reveal that the sky really was vermilion. There had certainly been hints that she'd known what had happened, and he'd had his doubts despite her insistence, but he'd trusted that she'd talk in her own time, and trusting in that was better than questioning her when questioning her only sparked another argument. In truth, it bothered him a bit, like an itch that hadn't quite crawled its way to the surface, but he chose to believe that she'd been unable to tell him the truth, rather than to let his fears cajole him into believing that she had lied to him. It was just another way that this struggle had come between them.

And he couldn't let it come between them again.

He didn't have all the pieces, and maybe like her relationship with Will, he never would—and even if he did, he couldn't be sure that he'd understand—but the picture of a jigsaw starts to take shape long before the final piece is slotted into place. The guilt that she felt, the guilt that had engulfed her since the day of the poisoning, didn't come simply from her having been the target or her having been the one to invite Will to the restaurant. She had literally handed him poisoned food. Unwittingly, for sure. But in her mind, maybe somehow that equated to her poisoning him.

For the first time since knowing her, he felt like he didn't have a clue what was going on with her. Maybe her eyes were vermilion too. To begin with he thought it was just shock from the trauma, then worrying about Will, then lack of sleep, then grief, then lack of sleep and grief, then possibly depression, and now there was a whole new depth to her guilt. And that was before wading into the mire that was the grief over their parents. It felt like just turning it over in his mind was enough to strain a muscle. Maybe it didn't matter anyway. Causes weren't solutions.

But he had an idea.

A bad idea, no doubt.

It might well take them to DEFCON 1.

But if she was going to forgive herself and get through this, if she was going to come back to him and their children, there was one big issue that she needed to confront. A different kind of trigger. One that he'd known about pretty much since day one.

* * *

**1987**

It made no sense.

The text—Henry couldn't say which—lay abandoned atop the oak desk, its pages whisper-thin and graced with a yellowed translucence; a raft that drifted amidst the sea of engravings that had been scratched into the wood with the blunt-tipped point of a pair of compasses. His gaze kept drifting too, towards the spindle-back chair tucked beneath the desk in front of the arched window, whilst his mind kept drifting to the girl who normally claimed that seat and whose pile of textbooks still stood stacked atop that desk, a note penned in her cursive handwriting propped on top of them, asking that they not be removed—and implicitly threatening anyone who dared touch them.

Coming to the library was meant to be a distraction, anything to stop him from replaying their date again and again whilst he stared up at his bedroom ceiling, studying it as though the answer might lie within the swirls of plaster. He had analysed every second, rewound the tape, paused it, examined each and every frame.

Nothing.

It was at the point when he caught himself touching his cheek, his fingertips lingering over the spot Elizabeth had kissed when she'd wished him a breathy, "Goodnight, Henry."—(He swore to God that the way she said his name did things to him that must be at least ten kinds of illegal.)—before she drew back to reveal the sparks that danced in her eyes and the way her bottom lip was now pinned between her teeth, that he realised he needed to get out of there. Fast. Before he found himself with a boombox stood outside her bedroom window.

Not that it would have done him much good. She wasn't in her dorm; nor the canteen; nor the library; nor sat on one of the benches in the quad; nor stood next to the podium at the front of class, still grilling her professor on part of the lecture long after everyone else had gone. Nor was she anywhere else for that matter. Not the first time he'd checked, nor the second, nor the third. And she certainly hadn't been outside the Rotunda where they'd arranged to meet for their second date.

Coming to the library was meant to be a distraction. It was meant to stop him from churning over their date, looking for the sign he had missed, figuring out what he had done wrong. Instead, he found himself staring at her seat beneath the window, with the black of night pressing in, whilst the off-yellow glow of the lights and the stacks of books and the empty desks reflected back at him.

It made no sense.

They had talked for hours, though it felt more like minutes; she had laughed at the stories he regaled her with, (mostly in the right places); she had brushed her fingers against his as they strolled back to her dorm; and when he took her hand, he caught the smile that sprang to her lips; and when she caught the smile that sprang to _his_ lips, she rolled her eyes in response; she had breathed his name and filled his head with images that he didn't need to be raised Catholic to know were positively sinful; she had leant in until his every breath was heady with black rose and ylang-ylang, and she had kissed his cheek, her lips so soft and…

His hand crept towards the spot again.

He formed a fist and forced it back to the desk.

He needed to pull himself together._ People get stood up_. Or at least that's what he'd imagined the police would have told him had he reported her missing like he'd been half tempted to, before he realised that doing so probably veered more on the side of creepy than cautious.

Still, it made no sense.

"Hey…McCord—"

Jeff's voice and the slamming of a dictionary-thick textbook against the desk in front of him wrenched Henry out of his daze. His head jerked around, and he blinked.

Jeff shook his head to himself, yanked out the chair opposite and slouched down into the seat. "There's literally a blonde waiting for you on your doorstep and you're in here studying?"

Henry blinked again. "What?"

"The blonde." Jeff motioned to his hair, though his jet black mullet was far from blonde.

Henry frowned.

"With the body." Jeff made the universal gesture for 'breasts'.

Henry's frown deepened.

"And the legs." Jeff made a vague motion to his legs, hidden beneath the desk, though it looked more like he was shaking cramp out of his hand.

Henry's frown deepened further still.

Jeff rolled his eyes and returned to the textbook. "_Way_ out of your league."

Henry's eyebrows lifted. "Elizabeth?"

"That's what I said."

But Henry had already scooted his chair back, scrambled to his feet, dodged through the rows of desks, and was halfway towards the exit. He hadn't even stopped to leave his own passive-aggressive note on his belongings, so God only knew where they'd end up or if he'd ever see them again, not that he particularly cared, so long as he made it back to his apartment before Elizabeth gave up and walked off.

By the time he'd reached his block, run up the two flights of stairs and staggered onto his corridor, his heart was slamming into his ribs, his pulse was thick in his ears, and a metallic tang had flooded his mouth. It would have been a record time had he been doing his Physical Fitness Test. Perhaps that's what the Marines needed: to add a little incentive at the end.

And thank God his incentive was still there.

Elizabeth sat on the floor, her back pressed to the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her and crossed at the ankles, her blue canvas sneakers in a toppled heap next to her feet, having already been toed off. A family-sized bag of salted popcorn rested in her lap. She palmed three or four pieces into her mouth, crunched them over with her lips partly open, and then washed them down with a swig of the apple Slice soda that perched next to her. When she placed the can down with an aluminium clink, she did a double take. Her eyes startled wide when she caught sight of him, and she scrambled to her feet.

"Henry, I'm so sorry—" She ditched the bag of popcorn against the wall and then smoothed her hands down against the skirt of her pinafore dress as she padded over to him. "Something came up and I had to take care of it, and I was two hours down the road when I remembered our date and I couldn't turn back, and I've been driving pretty much non-stop for six or seven hours, apart from stopping for gas and popcorn because I hadn't eaten and I start getting all sick and spacey when I haven't eaten, and then I wanted to find you and apologise but you weren't here and I thought maybe you'd gotten a better offer, and dear God, I hope you haven't gotten a better offer and she's about to appear because that would be beyond mortifying." She clutched the side of her head and turned away. "God, I knew I should have just gone back to my dorm—"

"Elizabeth."

"What?" She spun back to face him. She looked a little miffed to be interrupted mid-rant.

"You're okay." He raised his eyebrows a fraction, asking for confirmation.

"What?" She frowned. "Of course I'm okay." Then it hit her, a flash of realisation that swept away the frown— "Were you worried about me?"

He gave a shrug, more of a flinch of the shoulders. Tried to maintain a certain nonchalance.

She saw straight through it. "Henry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

The door next to them wrenched open and Henry's neighbour, Michael, poked his head out through the gap. "Do you mind? Some of us are trying to sleep."

Henry was about to apologise and usher Elizabeth out of the corridor, but Elizabeth quirked an eyebrow at Michael. "Sleeping? Seriously? Because I've been sat out here a good half hour, and nothing that I've heard indicates that any actual sleeping has been going on in there. Unless, of course, you're in the habit of whining girls' names as you sleep."

A furious blush flared up Michael's neck and into his cheeks.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Elizabeth glared at Michael for a moment longer, and then returned to Henry as though nothing had happened, whilst Michael withdrew into the darkness of the apartment and eased the door shut again in silence. She reached for Henry's hand, tugged at his fingers, and offered him a smile that looked more like a wince. "I think maybe we should talk."

Henry nodded. Dumbstruck. Good thing too, otherwise he might have blurted out that he thought it entirely possible that he might just have fallen in love with her a tiny little bit.

* * *

The warmth from the day still hung in the air, not enough to be muggy, but enough to brush up against the skin; it was heightened by the smell of barbecue coals that smouldered on into the night, as present yet as vague as the golden glow from the buildings that surrounded the lawn. Everything was softened with a haze, even the stars above melted into the dark blue skies.

Henry and Elizabeth strolled side by side along the path, the silence between them thick, like a cloud of charged particles had settled between them. The only sound came from the soft tread of their footsteps across the rusted brick walkway, each occasional sneaker squeak magnified by the enveloping darkness. When her arm grazed against his, she shied away half a step and made a little sound as though clearing her throat.

He turned and watched her, only breaking his gaze every third or fourth step to check that he wasn't about to veer off the path and trip over one of the weather-dulled benches that lined it.

Her chin had dipped, and her long hair parted over her shoulder and shimmered in the supple light that groped through the night towards them. Her own gaze barely reached beyond the white-capped toes of her sneakers. It seemed impossible that this was the same girl who had stood her ground against Michael only minutes before.

And it fascinated him. Like a passage of text so carefully constructed that he couldn't help but find new layers of beauty with each rereading.

It fascinated him even more that he was actually going out with her, (after a masterclass in the art of persuasion), and that he had the opportunity to marvel at this enigma. He still couldn't quite believe that, when she could have dated whomever she wanted, she had chosen to date him.

A pinch knitted the middle of her brow.

Two steps later, she halted. "Henry…I don't think we should date."

Henry halted too. He turned back to face her. He opened his mouth but once again found that there were no words there. Just incoherent sounds. He fumbled for a 'why', but it refused.

She gave him a soft smile, imbued with that hint of a wince. "I like you and I had fun last week, really, but my life…" Her breath escaped her in a huff. Whatever ran through her mind in that moment, it looked like it left her winded. She shook her head to herself, and set her hair swaying over the denim straps of her pinafore dress and the collar of the pastel stripe shirt she wore beneath. Then she returned her gaze to his. "It's this chaotic mess of baggage, and I don't want to drag you, or anyone else, into it." Her smile appeared again, but it was even weaker and more pained than before. "That's why I kept turning you down… But then you got all stalker-y—in a sweet way—and I thought that maybe, just maybe, it could work. But turns out, not so much." Her shoulders rose, and her gaze cast out into the darkness that pressed down upon the lawn. "I mean, I didn't even manage to show up to our second date, and when I did it was about four hours too late and I was camped out on your corridor with a bag of popcorn and a can of Slice—" She gestured to said popcorn and Slice still clutched in one hand. "—that I don't even like and that's making me feel seriously queasy and that I only bought because it said it contained ten per cent fruit juice, and that might quite possibly be the closest thing I've had to fresh food since you took me out last week." She met him with that wince again. "So, you see, I think it's for the best if we don't date."

His brain had stalled on 'I like you', and it took a good few moments for him to catch up. _Chaotic mess…stalker-y but sweet…Slice._ The frown that had gripped his brow eased away and left no more than a furrow of hope. He met her eye. "But you like me?"

She opened her mouth, and then paused. One second, two seconds, three. Then her eyes narrowed on him. "Okay…did you not listen to a word I just said?"

He chuckled, and then glanced around them in search for somewhere to—

"Come here." He sat down on the bench at the edge of the path and motioned for her to take a seat next to him.

When she hesitated, he gestured again, his eyebrows raised and expectant. She liked him, and he wasn't going to let her go that easily, chaotic mess or not.

She paused for a second longer, but then scuffed over in half-steps—perhaps stalker-y wasn't looking quite so sweet right now—and she perched near the opposite end.

He twisted around so that he faced her, one leg folded in front of him, his arm rested along the back of the bench. His gaze flitted over her, and at the pain that had seeped back into her expression, his smile faded. Though he wanted to reach out and lay his hand over hers, he resisted, not wanting to push her. His voice softened. "What happened today?"

She stared down at the hem of her skirt, raised the can of Slice to her lips—the gold-green gleamed in the light that flooded over from the Pavilions—and then she grimaced and set it on the ground beneath the bench. "My brother. That's what happened."

Henry frowned. She hadn't mentioned a brother, or any of her family for that matter. Then again, he hadn't particularly wanted to wander into the minefield that was his own family on their first date either. "Is he okay?"

"If you mean: is he still breathing? Then, yes." Her voice lowered to a mutter and she shook her head to herself. "Though I could just about throttle him right now."

He offered her a smile. It was meant to be reassuring. "I'm pretty sure my sister feels that way about me—or worse—at least ninety-five per cent of the time."

But she met him with a look that quelled the warmth of that smile. Her eyes were already dark in the dim light, more pupil than anything else, but now that darkness deepened. "It's not the same."

"What did he do?"

"It's more like what he didn't do." She smoothed away any grains of salt that had fallen from the popcorn onto the denim of her pinafore.

Henry watched her and held to his silence. It felt as though he could sense something simmering up beneath her surface, tiny prickling bubbles waiting to pop. Or perhaps it was just the way her shoulders had crept up a fraction, the way the pinch in her brow had hardened, or the way she swept away those grains of salt (the ones he felt pretty sure didn't exist) with a Lady Macbeth-esque determination. Whatever it was, giving her a little space felt like the safest option.

Her hand stilled, and she looked up at him. "He was meant to get our aunt to sign some stupid permission form, but of course he didn't, because that's just who he is, and now she's away so it's up to me to drive all the way to our school—his school—and back again just to scrawl my signature on something I'm pretty sure I have no legal authority to sign, just so he can go on some stupid trip, and he can't even be bothered to take one second to thank me for it."

_What about your parents?_ The question leapt to his tongue.

Fortunately he stopped himself half a second before he asked it. Chaotic mess of baggage, taking comfort in the 'elegance' of mathematics, not realising that it was only natural for someone to worry about her when she disappeared off the face of the planet…? It was starting to make sense.

When her chin dipped, causing her hair to tumble forward, he eased closer to her and his hand crept across the bench towards where hers still rested in her lap. "Elizabeth…"

She looked up. Something in her eyes had hardened. Enough to make him freeze. "But none of that really matters anyway. What matters is that Will is a crisis on two legs, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the rest of my life clearing up after him, and I know you probably think that I've had a bad day and that I'm overreacting, but missing our date is just the beginning…"

She took a deep breath, steeled herself. When she met his gaze again, she was almost business-like. "So I think it's best for both of us if we stop now, before anyone gets hurt, and we can stick to being just friends instead."

"No." The word blurted out.

Her eyes narrowed. "No?"

"No." This time he shook his head too, just to make it perfectly clear. "Elizabeth…" His gaze drifted away into the curtain of night. _How to say it? How to make her understand?_ His gaze locked on hers again, firmer than before. "I have _zero_ interest in being just your friend."

"I repeat: Did you not listen to a word I just said?"

He smiled, though her scowl said that wasn't the response she was looking for. "Yes, and I don't care. I mean, I care that it bothers you, but the fact that you have baggage, or history, or whatever you want to call it, doesn't bother me."

"Henry…" She shook her head, and then twisted to mirror his stance. One arm rested along the back of the bench, and her fingertips almost brushed against his. "I don't think you understand."

"I know I don't. But I know that I want to." He eased his hand closer to hers, and when she didn't draw back, he covered her fingers with his own. "You fascinate me, Elizabeth Adams. I like you, and I want to get to know you, all of you."

She frowned. "Really?" From the look she gave him, he might as well have just told her that he fully intended to quit college and run away to join the circus.

"Absolutely. And if the last few weeks have taught me anything, it's that I can be a bit 'stalker-y'—" He gave the accompanying air quotes, and at her smile and the hint of a chuckle, his own smile blossomed too. "—in a sweet way, but only because apparently I have a thing for totally unavailable blondes…" He cocked his head to the side, as though contemplating that for a moment, and then shrugged. "Well, one totally unavailable blonde…" His smile widened in sync with hers, and he laced their fingers together atop the bench. "So, you can try to push me away, but the more unavailable you make yourself, the harder I'm going to fight for you."

"So, basically, you're telling me that I have no choice?"

"Of course you have a choice, but I'm not going to stop until you make the right choice."

"I see… And the right choice would be dating you?"

"I get to spend time getting to know you, and you get food that hasn't come off of a factory line." He shrugged. "Win-win."

She gave a look of mock horror. "You mean I can't live on popcorn and Slice?"

He pretended to ponder that. "Well, maybe if you had the full variety of flavours, you'd hit all your essential vitamins…" His expression softened, and he tugged at her fingers. "Go out with me." He paused. It was a risk, it was cheesy as all hell, but for her, it was worth it. "And who knows? Maybe I'll be able to help you 'make the complex simple and identify the pattern in the chaos'."

"Wow." The word escaped her in a breath. She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Quoting me from our first date? Bold move." But the glimmers that danced in her eyes said that it had paid off.

He grinned back at her. "It's just the beginning."

She laughed. A proper laugh, uninhibited, one with a little snort at the beginning that brought the hint of a blush to her cheeks. In that moment, he thought it more than entirely possible that he might just have fallen in love with her a tiny little bit.

"See, I do listen to what you say."

"You do." The lightness of that laughter faded. She squeezed his hand. "Thank you."

* * *

The fluorescent strips that lined the ceiling of Elizabeth's hallway hummed and blinked above them as they ambled along the corridor towards her room. Their pace grew slower and slower as they neared the end, the silence between them thick once more, but comfortable too, whilst their fingers tangled and untangled, plucking and teasing, as though those movements alone spoke for them. The grey cord carpet had acquired more than a lifetime's worth of questionable stains, as had the once white walls, and along with the black shadows of dead insects that punctuated the rectangular tubes of lighting, it gave the dorms a dingy feel.

But it heightened the glow between him and Elizabeth too. A contrast. Like the way the soft flicker of candlelight becomes precious when the darkness presses in around. Elizabeth had given him a glimpse into her own darkness that night, one he felt sure the depths of which he'd never quite fathom, but he hoped that in time he'd be able to bring her a little light, to show her that her letting others in wasn't just the right choice for him, but for her as well.

Elizabeth came to a stop outside her door. The bronze number nine that had been fixed to the oak had lost one of its screws, and someone had pivoted it around the remaining screw so that it hung in a 'six' upside down. She tilted her head towards the door, as though to say, '_This is me_', though of course—him having dropped her off last time, and her having kissed his cheek and breathed his name—they both knew that already. The silence between them thickened further still, until it exerted a pressure, one that both pushed and pulled.

Henry noticed she had made no move to let go of his hand, her palm now as sweaty as his own. "So… What's the etiquette for date number one-and-a-half?"

She pretended to think about it, her head cocked to one side. Then she gave a small shrug to match the smile that lit her lips. "You know, I don't think that's been defined."

"I guess we'll just have to freestyle it then." He tried to play it cool, but his body was alive with the thrum of his pulse. Perhaps it was a bold move, but that had worked before, and he needed it to be crystal clear that he definitely had no intention of being just her friend.

He stepped in towards her, until he swore he could feel the thrum of her pulse too, and with the hand that wasn't tangled in the sweaty knot of their fingers, he tucked her hair behind her ear. Had he touched silk after that, it would have felt coarse in comparison.

All the while, she stared up at him, her eyes shining whilst she drank him in.

And he wanted nothing more than to drown himself in that blue. He lingered there, cupping her cheek, and he swept his thumb over the soft arch of her cheekbone. Then, when her gaze broke from his and flitted to his mouth and she pinned her bottom lip between her teeth, he leant in.

Her eyelids fluttered shut. Her lips parted, just a fraction.

He was so close that he could taste the warmth of her breath. A hint of apple too. Just a few more millimetres and his lips would be on hers. The thud of his pulse pounded through his ears. All he wanted to do was close that gap, to savour her.

But he stopped.

A pause.

Then he murmured, "Is this okay?"

"Yes." The way she said it was almost as intoxicating as the way she said his name. Maybe more so as it ruffled over the tender skin of his lips.

He'd had no doubt in his mind. But that wasn't the game he was playing. She needed to realise that she had zero interest in being just friends too.

He continued to brush his thumb over her cheekbone whilst his lips hovered over hers. His exhale gave life to her inhale, his inhale drew life from her exhale. He eased his lips closer, no more than two millimetres between them now. He could taste the tingle of salt too.

Her body arched towards his, and her hand slipped beneath the open fronts of his shirt and settled against his waist, her touch all warmth through the cotton of his tee. Her lips were still parted and ready, inviting him—no, _luring_ him—in.

But rather than kissing her, he drew back a touch and nuzzled her nose instead.

He felt more than heard her gasp, a slight frustration, and he couldn't resist a grin. He murmured again, "Is this okay?"

"Yes." The hand on his waist now fisted his tee and urged him closer.

He brought his lips over hers once more, and hovered just a millimetre away. His thumb still swept over her cheekbone, an idle back and forth, as soft as a lullaby. Part of him wanted to draw back, just to see the contentment that radiated from her, like the purr from a cat, but he stayed right where he was, sipping from her every breath. God, this was going to kill him. "Is this—

"Yes, Henry, now just shut up and kiss me."

He smirked. "Okay."

And he did. He touched his lips to hers, featherlight at first, whilst his hand slid back and he threaded his fingers through her hair. He couldn't decide which was softer: the skin of her lips or the strands of her hair. When she moaned into the kiss, a throaty sound that reverberated through him, he decided he didn't care. That noise did things to him that must have been at least a hundred kinds of illegal and it conjured up images that he had no doubt would send him straight to hell. He didn't care about that either, so long as he got to hear it again. Her lips parted, and with a touch of her tongue, she invited him in.

Forget sugar and spice and all things nice. She was apple tang, warmed salt, blooms of black rose and ylang-ylang, soft and yielding, firm and controlling, breathless and breathing, the thrum that burned under his skin.

When they parted, their fingers still tangled, their chests heaving in sync, she looked up at him with swollen lips and an impish smile. The hand that had grasped the back of his neck now slid down to his chest. "Well, if that's what I get for standing you up…"

He grinned—couldn't help himself—and then risked a cheeky wink. "Just imagine what you get if you do show up."

She laughed and tilted her head back, and her body swayed towards him. His free hand moved to her hip and held her against him, and he made himself a promise there and then to try to make her laugh like that every time they were together. It suited her.

When her laughter settled, they stood like that for a moment longer. Suspended. Both flushed and grinning. Definitely more than just friends.

She tugged at his hand. "Goodnight, Henry."

"Goodnight, Elizabeth." His smile softened. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Barring any crises."

"Barring any crises." He squeezed her fingers and held onto that touch for all it was worth before he had to let go.

If she were a book, he could read her time and time again and each time discover a new depth to her meaning, things that he had missed, hidden intricacies, a labyrinth of connotations. He wasn't sure if he'd ever understand her in her entirety, but when he slowed for a moment as he strode away down the corridor and twisted around for one last look, only to find her paused outside the door to her room, smiling to herself while her fingertips ghosted over the lips he'd just kissed, he understood this: she made sense to him, and what she called baggage, he would never see as a burden. It was part of her, it made her, and even without understanding her, she made sense to him.

* * *

**Present Day**

**5:24 PM**

A life-size model of a human skeleton reclined in a black leather office chair in the corner of the doctors' lounge. It wore a top hat, a pair of hexagonal-framed Ray-Bans with pale blue gradient lenses, and had a red stethoscope slung around its neck. Someone had stuffed a piece of rolled up ECG paper—which Henry supposed was meant to be a spliff—between its grinning teeth.

And these were the people who'd had Elizabeth's life in their hands…?

Will slipped his cell phone out of the pocket of his sweatpants and tossed it down atop the table along with a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips, whilst Henry pulled out one of the black plastic chairs, the feet of which screeched across the floor in a way that jarred up the back of his neck. The phone skidded across the oak veneer before it came to a stop, and the spotlights overhead reflected in dapples off the screen.

A mini refrigerator stood tucked into the corner at the far end of the room. Will strode towards it; his trainers tacked to and peeled from the vinyl flooring with each step. Someone had drawn a seahorse in blue dry-wipe ink on the whiteboard that dominated the wall—God only knows why—and it loomed over Will as he stooped down, wrenched open the door of the refrigerator so that a hum of yellow light and a clinking of bottles flooded out, and then peered inside. His voice strained. "So…I guess I'd better ask how she's doing."

He grabbed one of the bottles of mineral water that lay on the top shelf, slammed the door shut with a muffled _thwump_, and turned to face Henry. "Wouldn't want it to seem like I don't care enough." He twisted the cap off, his gaze fixed on Henry, and the sarcastic tweak to his lips curled around the mouth of the water bottle as he took a swig.

Henry stared up at him from his seat at the table. He had lifted his takeaway coffee cup to his lips, but now stopped. His eyebrows raised a fraction. _Because asking out of obligation or just so you don't look bad is real caring…_ He took a sip, the coffee bitter and scalding, and then returned the cup to the table with a grimace. His hands formed a loose corral around the cup, just close enough for the warmth to radiate against his palms.

Will dragged out the seat opposite. "Or is that still above my clearance level?"

Henry paused. His gaze settled on the white plastic lid, the drinking hole now beaded with pearls of black Americano. He looked up and attempted a laid-back smile, but it fell flat, and he shook it away again. "Apparently it's above my clearance level too."

Will eyed him.

The silence sat in the air like the languid heat that kept the hospital at a constant level of soupy warm; summer in the city, thirsting for a breeze.

Henry's gaze dipped away again. "I honestly don't know what's going on with her." His hands moved in purposeless gestures against the table, and he shook his head as he spoke, the manner just as vague. "She hasn't called me, she's asked her therapist and the staff there not to share any information with me, I tried going there but I wasn't allowed to see her…"

The room dwindled back into the silence.

Will stared at him for a moment longer. "I see." The words lingered. Then he stretched for the bag of potato chips and pulled the packet open. A sting of vinegar hit the air. "Well, just think of it as payback for that time that you left her."

Henry's gaze shot up. A clench tightened his jaw. "I didn't leave her."

"You're forgetting that I was there. I read your 'letter'." Will leant back in his seat. He raked his fingers through his hair. It was still damp from the shower after his physiotherapy session and now clumped in bedraggled locks. His lips twisted, that smirk again. He shrugged. "Not the most eloquent of notes, I'll admit, but I think you got your point across."

_Elizabeth, I'm sorry—_

Henry's lips pursed. "I came back."

"And, in time, I'm sure she'll come back to you." Will placed one of the potato chips on his tongue, and then drew it into his mouth and bit into it with a _crunch_ that rippled through the room. _God, he was loving this_. "Or not."

Henry forced himself to take a breath. _How can you not want to punch him?_ Elizabeth had once asked, maybe the second or third occasion when he'd needed to haul her away for a time out before she could launch herself at her brother. Had she been in the room right now, threatening to throttle, punch or otherwise maim Will, he couldn't say that he would stop her.

But if she had been in the room, then he'd have no need to be there.

"I want you to go talk to her."

That wiped the smirk from Will's face. He stopped, his tongue poised to poke pieces of potato chip free from his teeth. "Why?"

Henry hunched forward and rested his elbows against the table. "I've spent the last God knows how many weeks looking for a way to help her, and maybe she's right that it's not my job to fix her, but this all comes down to the guilt she feels over what happened to the pair of you, so maybe if you go there and speak to her, then she'll be able to forgive herself and put this behind her." He met Will's eye. It might well have looked like he was pleading, but he couldn't say that he cared. Whatever it took. "Right now, I can't do anything for her, but you can."

Will studied him. The seconds frittered away as though someone had shredded time, flung it over the edge of a balcony, and watched it flutter down until it was lost to the hubbub of the streets below. Then he leant forward too and mirrored Henry's stance. When he spoke, his voice drawled. "You do realise that in coming here and asking me to help her…technically you're still trying to help her." He cocked an eyebrow.

Henry got it: why Elizabeth sometimes said that Jason reminded her of Will. That same wise-ass glint and smug smile. "All I'm asking is for you to go talk to her, let her see that you're okay and tell her you don't blame her for what happened."

"But…what if I do?" A challenge lit Will's eyes.

_What?_ Henry drew back. _How could he possibly—?_

Will held up one hand and the smile returned. "I'm kidding." He raised the bottle of water to his lips, and as quickly as the smile had arisen, it faded and took on an almost sepia-like quality, whilst a glaze to his eyes turned his gaze distant. "Life happens." Then he stopped. A pensive look. "Or did I mean a different four-letter word?" He paused for a moment longer, and then shrugged off the look and took a swig.

"So…you'll go?"

Will swallowed with a grimace, and returned the bottle to the table with a crackle of plastic. He shook his head. "No."

Henry frowned. "Why not?"

"This is Lizzie's drama. I'm not getting involved."

"But she's your sister."

"Yet somehow people never define her as Will Adams's big sister. Funny, that."

Henry massaged the furrows of his brow. _The pair of them… _"Do you think we could perhaps save the Adams sibling psychodrama for another time?"

"A rather apt word choice." Will held Henry's gaze for a drawn-out moment, and then he turned away and clicked the screen of his cell phone on and then off again, perhaps checking the time, perhaps just for the distraction. "Look, Henry, I know that you're worried about her, but as I've already told you, she's not my responsibility, and—I should point out—she's not yours either." He grabbed another potato chip from the bag and then spoke through his mouthful with a shrug. "Just leave her to it, and she'll come home when she's ready."

"She wanted to kill herself, Will." The words came so sharp that they carved out the silence around them. Henry's heart pounded against his ribs. It shook through him and emerged as a tremor in his fingers that he stilled by clutching his coffee cup. "So, yes, I'm worried about her, and no, I won't just 'leave her to it'."

Will's gaze flitted over him. It looked as though he was searching for something. "Just to be clear, I meant leave her to the therapy, not to…" He trailed off.

"Oh. So, you'll make quips about it, but you're not prepared to say it?"

A line of tension radiated along Will's jaw, and he leant back in his seat, the potato chips abandoned. At least his expression had sobered.

Henry plucked his wallet from his inside jacket pocket, fumbled free the clinic's business card—Dr Sherman's direct number was scrawled across the reverse—and pushed it across the table. The glossy surface caught a shimmer of light; the spotlight reflected as a hazy pool. "All I'm asking is for you to go there and talk to her."

Will stared at the card, but he made no move to pick it up.

Henry took a sip of coffee, his gaze fixed on Will over the top. When he returned the cup to the table, Will still hadn't moved. _Was it really too much to ask that Will visit Elizabeth and let her see that he was okay, that things between them were okay?_

Henry's fingers flexed around the cup where he cradled it atop the table. "You know, she was the one who found that study. She was the one who told your doctor about it. Her staff were the ones who helped arrange the treatment. If it weren't for her, you wouldn't be sitting here right now. You'd still be lying there, on that ward, in a coma."

Will's gaze flicked up, the look it held as sharp as frost. "And if she hadn't been obsessing over finding a way to fix me, if she hadn't been exhausting herself looking for that study, then she wouldn't have driven herself to the point of a breakdown." He pushed the card back across the table, so hard that it skittered across the surface. "I told you before, this is her issue, and I don't want to be a part of it."

"But you're a part of it whether you like it or not."

"I think you'll find that's a bit non sequitur, professor. Just because she blames herself for what happened to me, doesn't mean that I'm required to go there and forgive her."

"What harm will it do to go there and talk to her?"

Will had no answer for that, or at least not one he was willing to give.

The silence that followed reminded Henry of the smouldering silence he was met with—after an initial outburst, of course—each time that he brought up their parents. Both of them claimed that no one but them could understand what it was like to lose their parents in the way that they did, which wasn't entirely untrue—the situation was unimaginable, and anyone who claimed that they could empathise most likely mistook their pity for empathy—but perhaps the real truth of it was that, if pushed, neither of them would be able to explain it either, let alone appreciate just how much it had affected each of them and their relationship. It wasn't long into his relationship with Elizabeth, and consequently with Will, that he'd learnt he was meant to shut up the moment either of them cried 'orphan'. It was a shock tactic. A defence mechanism. It demanded silence. And it enabled them to avoid talking about it.

Maybe that's what Will was afraid of now. If he visited Elizabeth at the clinic, they might actually have to confront it. But that was nothing compared to the fear Henry felt for what might happen to Elizabeth if they didn't confront it.

Henry pushed the business card towards Will again. He held it there, pinned beneath three fingers. He stared at Will until Will met his gaze, and then he held that there too, locked. "When I found out that you had both been poisoned, I was told that getting her up to a therapeutic dose as quickly as possible was her best chance for survival. I could have told them to give her all of the available antidote and make you wait for the rest to be couriered from other hospitals. But I didn't. I delayed her treatment so that you could be treated too. I risked losing her just so that you would stand a chance, an equal chance, because I thought that's what you both would have wanted, to live together or die together. Now, if you're honestly telling me that you don't give a damn about her and it doesn't worry you that maybe she could end up hurting herself or struggling for the rest of her life because of what's happened, then fine, don't do it for her—do it for me. Because like it or not, the decision I made saved your life. Regardless of what you think about her, I love her, I love her enough to lose her over you, and you owe me at least this much." He tapped the card. "Call her therapist, visit her, make sure I don't lose her to this."

Will stared straight back at him, his eyes masked in a layer of ice.

If his plan was to stare Henry down, he sorely underestimated the training that came with thirty-odd years of living with Elizabeth. Henry had been met with a more ferocious glare after taking a bite of her cinnamon raisin bagel.

"If I did decide to go," Will said, "I'm not going to mollycoddle her."

"I'm not asking you to."

A lull.

Henry sank back in his seat and forced a shrug that belied the tension that twisted beneath his surface. "You're going to have to see her at some point."

Will continued to stare back at him, his lips tensed. It looked as though he were searching for any reasonable excuse to get out of it. Thank God the two of them couldn't cry 'orphan' with each other, at least not without forcing themselves to confront it.

But as he stared, that layer of ice thawed a touch. Barely perceptible; unless, of course, you were accustomed to it. The melt was just enough to reveal a glimpse of the dark current that swarmed beneath. Maybe the loss of their parents wasn't the only thing that Will was afraid of confronting.

Will broke the gaze and dragged the card towards him. "Well, I suppose I have some time to kill, seeing as how apparently my going back to work would interfere with her cover story." He studied the card. A flicker of a frown flashed across his brow; it was there less than a fraction of a second before he smothered it.

Henry raised his eyebrows. "You'll go?"

Will placed the card down on top of his cell phone, and then looked up again and swept back the damp locks of his fringe. "I'll think about it."

The tension in Henry eased—a surge of relief that made it feel as though he'd let go of a breath he hadn't been aware he was holding. That moment of weightlessness lifted the corners of his lips, and as he leant back in his chair, he concealed that rumour of a smile with a sip from his Americano. Thirty-odd years with Elizabeth had also taught him the reluctantly conceded defeat held in an off-hand '_I'll think about it_'.

But then his smile bittered along with the swig of coffee, and the tension crept in again. He only hoped that the visit _would_ help her, because thirty-odd years with her wasn't even half of what he wanted.

The door to the doctors' lounge swung open. A giggle and the murmur of voices rushed in.

Both Henry and Will pivoted around.

That giggle. He knew that giggle. He frowned. "Stevie?"

Stevie stopped dead just inside the doorway. Her eyes had startled wide, and her fingers flurried to push the hand off her hip. "Hey, Dad…"

Henry's gaze flitted up, a little to the left. His jaw clenched. "Dr Owens."

Dr Owens's cheeks had flushed. He edged a step away from Stevie. He nodded to Henry. "Dr McCord." Then he turned and nodded to Will too. "Dr Adams."

Will smirked. "Dr Owens… Stephanie."

Stevie's cheeks had flushed too. "Uncle Will."

The room filled with a silence so awkward that it jarred against the nerves and caused the shoulders to tighten, as though in preparation for a cringe. Stevie's gaze darted around the room as though she were looking for an escape route, or perhaps just a hole to crawl into and die in, whilst Dr Owens dug his fingertips into the back of his neck as though he hoped that one of the knobbles were an ejector—or perhaps, self-destruct—button.

If it were possible, Will's smirk deepened. He plucked a potato chip from the packet and leant back in his chair. He drank in the couple stood in front of him. "So, I guess this solves the mystery of the Secret Service goons loitering outside the on-call room." He popped the potato chip into his mouth and let out a loud crunch.

Correction: _Now_ Dr Owens's and Stevie's cheeks flushed.

Stevie's eyes widened even further, and she lowered her voice to a hiss. "_Uncle Will._" She turned back to Henry. "Dad, I swear—"

Henry grappled for words. Any words. He stared open-mouthed at his daughter. His throat clunked. "But… I thought you said they were a buzz kill."

Stevie buried her face in her hand, and groaned. "This is so not happening."

"So," Will said, "her daughter is cavorting in on-call rooms with her doctor, and her husband, who she's trusted to look after said daughter, doesn't have a clue." He picked up the clinic's business card and his cell phone. "Lizzie's going to love this."

For a split second, all of Henry's fears about Elizabeth evaporated, only to be replaced with a different set. It was no longer a case of _if _she came back to them, but _when _she came back to them…and the wrath that would no doubt come along with it._ I mean seriously, Henry, I leave you in charge for a few weeks…_

Stevie's hand dropped. The dread in her expression said that her line of thought wasn't too dissimilar. Both she and Henry turned to Will. "You can't tell her anything."

* * *

**I hope you enjoyed this chapter. It's one of the longer ones, so—unless there are any strong objections—I might leave a day or two before I post the next chapter.**

**Thank you for reading and reviewing!**


	72. Chapter Seventy: a source of connecti

**Chapter Seventy**

**…****a source of connection.**

**Elizabeth**

**Tuesday, 11th December, 2018**

**2:48 PM**

Elizabeth didn't have a clue how Henry did it.

She dropped the ballpoint pen onto the notepad. It rolled away, running parallel to the faint grey lines that divided the page, toppled over the upper edge and clattered onto the dressing table. She snatched off her reading glasses, held them by the tip of one arm, and let them dangle over the notepad, whilst with her other hand she massaged away the dents they had left on the bridge of her nose. Some vague part of her hoped that when she looked down at the page again, the words would have appeared, as though in removing her glasses she had lifted a filter that stopped her from seeing the invisible ink. Though, of course, when she did, they hadn't. Instead, all that stared back at her were the only two words she'd managed to muster in the last twenty-three hours:

_Dear Henry…_

With her elbows propped against the oak, she toyed with the plastic frames and studied the otherwise blank page, doing her best to avoid her reflection in the mirror. The watery light that flowed in through the window behind, and her limited supply of cosmetics, didn't do her any favours. Not that the worry lines helped much either.

Henry had a flair for romantic gestures great enough to rival, and possibly surpass, her knack for foreign languages. That's where the idea had come from. Those letters he used to write her when he was overseas on active duty, the ones he'd bring back with him, so that when that gasp-breath of time they had together ended and he went away again, she'd at least have those glimpses of him for comfort. Each one was crafted so carefully that it felt as though his emotions had bled into the ink, and as she read them and heard the words in his voice, she couldn't help but feel it. Feel him.

There was something about the written word. More considered, more precise. Necessary when the subject was complex and could easily cause offence. Possibly why her staff, not to mention the White House (ahem, Russell Jackson…), strongly preferred her to stick to Matt's rigorously vetted speeches, rather than allowing her to wing it as and when the feeling took her. And nothing felt more complex than trying to explain to Henry what she had been through recently, and nothing had the potential for offence like trying to tell him that although she needed (wanted) his support, she also wanted (needed) space.

_Wait._

Her fingers stilled against the frames of her glasses, whilst the worry lines of her reflection deepened.

Not _space _space.

Never that.

But that was just an example of how loaded a word could be.

_Henry, I love you, but I need space…_

Her eyes slipped shut, and she pinched the bridge of her nose as her mind groaned.

Innocent intent, hurt nonetheless.

She took a breath. Her shoulders rose with it and elicited a tweak in her ribs.

Considered words. Precise words. Crafted, rather than ad-libbed. That's where the idea of the letter came in. A way to explain, and a way to reconnect.

And it was a good idea…in theory at least.

If only she hadn't lost her command of basic English.

A treatise on global water shortage in French, German or Arabic? She could have churned out a draft in a matter of minutes. But finding the words to explain how she had ended up in a state that required a stay at the clinic, or to reassure him that the same thing wouldn't happen again…?

She didn't have a clue how Henry did it. Let his soul flow onto the page like that, when '_Dear Henry_' took her twenty-three hours to write and left her emotionally spent.

She folded the arms of her reading glasses, twisted around on the padded stool and leant over to place them next to Henry's pair on the bedside table. Another ache rippled through her ribs with the stretch. The two pairs of glasses sat side by side, and in a few days—so long as nothing happened—she could be sat side by side with him. She only hoped that the words would flow then.

The yearning to be home pulled like a current deep inside her, something more vital than the blood that coursed through her arteries and veins.

But then apprehension rose up like a dam. It quelled everything. In a way, it reminded her of that churning of feelings, want and anxiety, that she'd felt when she'd learnt Henry was returning from overseas for good. She'd wanted nothing more than to be with him, for them to start their life together properly, but at the same time she couldn't shake the feeling that so much had happened in his time away and neither of them was the same person that they'd been when they'd gotten married. Being apart became easier in a way, because then they didn't need to confront the fact that maybe things between them would have changed.

At least with the Marines they had both known that he would be going away, and when he came back there was no fear that he would leave again, not without warning. Her descent into a breakdown hadn't been planned, and as the last twenty-three hours had proven, there were no words to reassure him that the same thing wouldn't happen again. The only true similarity was the worry that things between them might have changed.

But they had been okay after he returned, hadn't they?

Teething problems aside.

* * *

**1994**

"The milk goes on the shelf," Elizabeth said, "not in the door."

Henry slammed the refrigerator door shut so hard that the bottles inside jangled and clinked.

Elizabeth jumped, and the coffee in her hands sloshed against the side of the mug.

Henry spun around to face her, his jaw tensed, his teeth clenched, the shadows in his eyes seething. "Do you even want me here?" he shouted.

Elizabeth's calves strained as she fought to stop herself from recoiling. She found herself stumbling back half a step anyway, and her grip on her coffee mug tightened and pressed her wedding ring into the flesh of her finger. It bit to the bone. Her mouth opened, but no words came.

Henry swept his hands through wild gestures. It was like a clockwork mechanism had been wound up, wound up, wound up, and now it spiralled through its release. "Ever since I got back, it's like I'm constantly under your feet, messing up your routine, and you can't wait for me to leave again. Well, guess what? This is it now. I'm back, and I'm staying. So it'd be nice if you'd stop treating me like some kind of inconvenience."

Outside, dogs barked, cars sailed past, children laughed and sang as they played.

Inside, Henry continued. "For Christ's sake, Elizabeth, I'm currently living out of a bag in the bottom of our closet—" He thrust his hand towards their bedroom. "—because not only have you rearranged all the cupboards—" He drew a circle around the kitchen. "—and changed our parking space—" He batted a hand towards the window. "—but you've taken over every last inch of our dressers as well. So, do you even want me here? Because it sure as hell doesn't feel like it."

Elizabeth stood in silence, her heart thumping, her gaze fixed on Henry.

His chest heaved, the rise and fall exaggerated to tidal proportions. The weak sunshine that drifted in through the window caught on the dog tag that hung below the neckline of his tee and threw off piercing glints. The shadows in his eyes showed no sign of dissipating, and his hands were still held wide, welcoming her response.

But what could she say? She just didn't want the milk to go off before its use-by date.

She placed her coffee down on the counter. The _clunk_ echoed out. Without a word, or so much as a glance at Henry, she turned her back on him and retreated to their bedroom. Silence throbbed through the air, and the soft tread of her bare feet across the carpet grated against that jarring hush.

Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes had passed by the time Henry joined her. He stopped in the doorway. One hand rested against the frame whilst the other ran over his hair and then gripped his neck. He shook his head, his gaze lowered. "Elizabeth…I—"

But then he stopped.

And he must have caught sight of the bag on the floor and all of her clothes strewn across the bed, because a second later, he rushed towards her. "Elizabeth, I didn't mean—"

She turned to face him, her hands on her hips. She tilted her head towards the dresser. "I think underwear belongs in the top drawers, I don't know why, but that's just how it works in my mind." She gave a small shrug. "What do you think?"

He stopped. His mouth hung open, whilst a frown descended on his brow. "I…"

"And do you want one and I take the other, or do you want to split them? One for socks, and one for everything else?"

"Uh…" A pause.

"And is it okay if I take the second drawer for pyjamas and bras? Because you rarely wear the former and, I have to say, I'd be a little bit concerned if I found you wearing the latter."

He continued to stare at her.

When she cracked a small smile, urging him towards realisation, his frown lifted and he let out a laugh, more like a huff of relief. He massaged his brow, his own smile still playing at the corners of his lips, and then beckoned her closer. "I'm sorry."

She stepped into the circle of his arms, and as his hands came to settle at her waist, her palms flush to his chest, she looked up at him. "It's okay."

"You're not mad at me?"

"Nothing that throwing my clothes onto the bed hasn't helped."

He turned his head to stare at the rubbish heap of pyjamas, jeans, underwear and tees that rose up from their duvet. "Should I be concerned that there's a recurring pattern with you taking your feelings out on your clothing?"

"Just something you're going to have to get used to if you're going to live with me." Her fingers fluttered against his chest, and drew his gaze back to her. Her smile softened. "You were right, and I'm sorry that I've made you feel that way."

He shook his head, and opened his mouth to speak.

But she pressed one finger to his lips and gave him a look that warned him she hadn't finished. When he held to his silence, despite the smirk beneath, she continued. "It's been a while since we've lived together properly, and I've had to learn to live on my own again, so yes, I've found my own routine and I like things to be a certain way and all my stuff has expanded to fill the space, but I don't want you to ever think that means I don't want you here." She smoothed her palm up his chest, whilst her other hand lowered from his lips, and her fingers came to lock behind his neck. "You coming home to me alive and in one piece is all I've wanted every day for the past four years, and now that you are here, it's just going to take me a little time to adjust, that's all." She broke their gaze and gave a slight shake of the head. "Changing our parking space was only because Mrs Marcel's mother came to stay and she struggles getting in and out of the car, so it was easier for them if they had our kerb space. As for the cupboards…well, that was just me taking out my frustration on our kitchen." Her lips quirked. "Another thing you're gonna have to accept."

His fingers flexed, kneading her waist. "So, you're not planning on getting rid of me?"

"No." She smiled up at him, and then rolled her eyes. "Or not today anyway." She swayed her body into his. "I like having a man around the house…apartment…"

He grinned. "Oh, really?"

She gave a small shrug.

"I'm sorry for shouting at you."

"I'm pretty sure I'm still ahead of you on that score."

His shoulders flinched. "Even so."

"Call it even?"

"Deal." His eyes shone as he stared down into her own. Then he tilted his head to the side—a question—and at her nod, he leant in to seal it with a kiss.

It was a slower, sweeter kiss than those urgent ones they'd shared when he'd first come home a couple of weeks ago. Unrushed. Inviting, rather than demanding. It felt like it marked a shift. Before there had been a fervid desperation, two lives colliding at a single point in time, a primal need for connection before they were scattered and sent their separate ways. But now their lives were converging, and it was up to them and them alone to ensure that their paths entwined. It felt like training a tree to grow a certain way; only through continual effort and commitment would they be able to guide those paths into weaving together. Each decision, each action, accumulated to determine their future shape. It made each moment less urgent, but more important. The balance had tipped. The future of their relationship no longer solely at the mercy of the whims of fate.

When they drew back, he pressed his forehead to hers, their eyes still shut, and they stood like that for a moment, his hands clinging to her waist, her thumbs brushing back and forth over the angles of his jaw, as they let the weight of the task before them settle into place.

She took a breath, and then sighed it out and pulled away. She twisted to face the empty drawers of the dresser, all hanging open like lolling tongues. "Right, so where do you want your t-shirts to go?"

"I don't know. But I know where I want your t-shirt to go." He tugged at the hem of her tee.

She laughed, and tilted her head back. "God, Henry…" _Some things never change._

* * *

The late afternoon light lazed through the grey slats of the venetian blind and fell in hazy lines upon the sea of clothes that sprawled in rucks and troughs across the floor. Elizabeth nestled against Henry, and relished his warmth and scent; her fingertips drew idle swirls in the fine hairs that dusted his chest, still damp with sweat, whilst his dog tag shimmered with the ripples of his breath.

The sex had been different too, a confirmation of and a commitment to that subtle shift; as tender as the first time they had explored each other's bodies, yet not as tentative. A kind of déjà visité. Familiarity found in a foreign place.

Henry traced his fingertips up and down the curve of her shoulder. "So, I was thinking…"

She craned her neck to look up at him. A smirk. "Don't strain something, captain."

"Right." He rolled towards her and grabbed hold of her before she could wriggle away.

Whilst she pleaded and squealed, he launched a relentless assault, tickling her ribs. Only when her eyes were watering, turning the room to a blur, and she laughed out 'yield', did his attack cease.

He propped himself up on his elbows, his body flush to hers as she lay on her back and stared up at him. Although he tried to hold onto his smile, the effort beneath it crept through, and it caused her own smile to dim. He brushed back the strands of hair that had stuck to her damp forehead, no longer meeting her eye. "I'd like to go on a pilgrimage."

"A _pilgrimage_?" She scrambled to sit up, forcing him to roll away and lie on his side next to her. She clutched the crisp-cool sheet to her chest. _He's only just come home, and now he wants to go away again?_

"Mount Kailash in Tibet."

"_Tibet_?" _Okay, now she was just repeating words, but what the hell are you meant to say when your husband tells you he wants to go on a pilgrimage to Tibet?_

He sat up too, and then shuffled back to lean against the headboard. He gave a stilted shrug and his hands made vague gestures, whilst his gaze dipped to the mattress between them. "They say that the waters of Lake Manasarovar are meant to cleanse you of the sins of a lifetime, after everything that I've done in the Marines, I think I could use some of that." He stilled and then lifted his gaze to meet her eye. His mouth opened, but he paused, as though he were reconsidering what he had intended to say next. Then he gave her a tweak of a smile. "And I think it'll help me adjust too."

She studied him. There was a certain softness around his eyes that seemed almost pleading, whilst within them, the hint of a shadow lurked. She didn't want him to go away and leave her there alone again, but she couldn't risk their life together falling apart. They both needed to adjust.

She reached out and took his hand, and then squeezed his fingers tight. "Whatever you need." She clung to him, and tried to force a smile, whilst the prickle of tears blurred her eyes. "Just promise me you're not going to join some monastery and start raising yaks."

He gave her a smile, only weak. "I hear they're highly intelligent creatures."

Then he shifted so that he was knelt in front of her. He cupped her cheek and let his thumb sweep back and forth over her cheekbone, whilst he stared down into her eyes. "I promise."

* * *

**Present Day**

A cloud passed by, and the weak sunlight that had washed over the bedroom drained away. The leading edge of the shadow crept from one side of the bedside table to the other; it engulfed Elizabeth's reading glasses first and then Henry's, and it brought with it a prickle to the air like chilled static that coaxed the hairs of her arms to attention.

Life after the Marines had been a challenge at first. Both of them had grown up over the course of his tours, and in some ways, they had grown apart. But with time and a commitment to nurture their relationship, to see the seeds they had sown years before released from their dormancy and start to grow and thrive, they had learnt to live together and love together again.

She had never given Henry's decision to go on a pilgrimage much thought before, not after he had returned with a lightness about him like a person whose soul has been lifted, freed from its constraints like a dove out of a cage, and they soon became so swept up in buying their first house and trying for a baby that it left little room for reflection. But looking back now, the memories from that period of their lives felt tainted—steeped in a grey-blue light—by the fact that she now knew he had been struggling at the time.

_'__It feels like I'm drowning.'_

_'__I've felt like that before too.'_

_'__Really?'_

_'__Perhaps the waters were a little shallower, but yes.'_

_'__When?'_

_'__A few times, but definitely after the Marines.'_

It had stung her to learn that he'd felt that way but said nothing of it at the time. If only he'd told her, she would have done whatever she could to help him. But maybe he didn't have the words to tell her; maybe he thought she wouldn't understand; maybe he worried it would come between them; maybe he thought her perception of him would change; maybe he feared she'd take it the wrong way; maybe he didn't want to become a burden, an obligation, a worry; maybe…

It felt like her mind had been churning through combinations of numbers, and only now did the lock spring free as they clicked into place. The solution? As obvious as Will using one-nine-seven-zero as the combination to his locker and the passcode to his cell phone: The nature of his and her struggles might have been different, the waters not as deep and perhaps not even in the same lake, but maybe the fears that had stopped him from telling her back then and the worries she had about talking to him when she returned home now were the same.

The cloud sailed on, and the sunlight flooded back in. It swept the shadow away. A moment later, the gentle warmth smoothed against her skin. Perhaps she'd never see those memories in the same light again, but that didn't have to mean that they were tainted. They could become a common ground, a source of connection, a way for him to understand how she was feeling.

The hint of a smile lifted the corners of her lips. She picked up her glasses and slipped them on. When she twisted around on the padded stool only to be met with those two words that still stared up at her from the otherwise blank page, '_Dear Henry_', she allowed herself a huff of self-derision. _Productive day…_

She still didn't have a clue how Henry did it. He had a way with words that made her look dumb in comparison, no matter what the language. But there was a bittersweet comfort to be found in knowing that at one point the words had gone silent on him—both an ache of loss that she hadn't known at the time and had been denied the chance to help him, and a frisson of hope that even if she didn't have the perfect words now, he'd understand and they'd find a way to reconnect.

Considered words. Precise words. Crafted, rather than ad-libbed. Certainly useful when talking about a subject that was complex and could easily cause offence. But those qualities alone weren't what gave power to a speech. '_I'm struggling_', '_I need your support_', '_This is how you can help me_'. Simple words, plain words; life-changing in their raw honesty.

She reached for the ballpoint pen that had rolled over the top of the notepad and towards the back edge of the dressing table. But then stopped. A puzzled frown gripped her brow.

_Okay…_

She braced herself against the oak and pushed herself up to standing. The feet of the stool scuffed across the carpet behind. Either she was hallucinating, or she'd just heard a horse's whinny.

* * *

**2:53 PM**

The brisk air tickled Elizabeth's bare soles and sharpened each breath as she strode across the clipped lawn of the gardens behind the clinic, her lace-lost sneakers flapping away from her heels with every step. The gardens smelt of cold and coal smoke, a scent that captured winter and conjured up images of a frost-dusted paddock, fences laced with frozen spider webs, and clouds of condensation pluming with each breath. At the far end of the garden, a buckskin mare had slipped her head between the slats of the split-rail fence and she grazed on the grass on the clinic side.

"Ma'am—" Matt was on duty that day and had followed Elizabeth outside. The thud of his footsteps chased after her. "—will you please not approach the animal."

"She's a horse, Matt, not an alligator."

"More people are killed each year by horses than alligators, ma'am."

Elizabeth halted. With her arms still folded across her chest, hugging her cardigan around her, she twisted around and frowned at Matt. "Seriously?"

He gave a half-nod, half-shrug. "According to the CDC."

_Well, that sounds like a great use of taxpayer money._

Elizabeth shrugged and strode on. "Well, then it's a good thing I don't own a whole…flock? herd? pack?…"

"String, ma'am."

"String?" She cast another frown over her shoulder. "Really?"

"I believe so, ma'am."

She shook her head to herself and muttered, "Would not have guessed that." Then she continued aloud again, "Well, it's a good thing I don't own a whole _string_ of them then."

The horse stopped grazing as Elizabeth neared. She pulled her head back through the gap in the fence and then stood waiting on the other side, staring straight at Elizabeth, her ears pricked.

Elizabeth let her arms fall away from her chest, her hands open and loose at her sides. The cold air rushed in through the open fronts of her cardigan and snuck beneath her tee; it tingled over her skin, not bitter, but soothing. Her pace slowed, and she held out one hand. "Hey, girl."

"Ma'am…" Matt's footsteps had come to a stop behind her.

The horse continued to stare at Elizabeth. She had a small star, shaped more like a comma, peeking out from beneath the black strands of her forelock, and a snip between her nostrils. Her coat was a honeyed gold. When Elizabeth stopped a couple of strides away from the fence, the horse's ears relaxed, she took half a step closer and then lowered her head over the upper slat.

At the horse's welcome, Elizabeth eased over, her hand still held out. When the horse nuzzled into her touch, Elizabeth smiled to herself, whilst warmth surged through her chest like sunlight unfurling from a ball; it left her immune to the cold all around. "Hey, gorgeous."

"Ma'am—"

"I was talking to the horse, Matt."

Matt huffed, not impressed by her quip. "You're not meant to be talking to the horse. You're meant to be staying inside and talking to your therapist."

"Horses are my therapy. Aren't cha, darlin'?" She stroked the horse's nose, the smooth expanse just above the muzzle, and the horse nodded into the touch. "Yes, yes." She shot Matt a glance over her shoulder. "See, she agrees with me."

Matt's dour expression deepened. "The horse isn't agreeing with you, ma'am."

"Well, she's nodding, isn't she?"

He shook his head to himself, utter exasperation. "Because that's what horses do."

The horse nudged up against Elizabeth, demanding more attention, and Elizabeth returned to stroking her, one hand rested against the broad ridge of her nose whilst the other reached up to thread her fingers through the coarse mane that sprouted from the top of her crest. She looked into the horse's eyes and found a life looking back at her. "We know, don't we, girl."

Then the back of her neck tensed. She paused for a moment, and then tilted her chin towards her shoulder. "Matt, I can literally feel your eyes rolling from here."

Matt let out a stream of a sigh, not dissimilar to a horse's snort, and he shook his head to himself.

Elizabeth turned away again. She rubbed the horse's comma-shaped star, the fingers of her other hand still tangled through the mane. The warmth from her chest spread through her in a wave; it reached all the way to the tips of her fingers. "You knew what I needed, didn't you?"

_Laughter rippled up from the kitchen table where they all sat._

_"__Okay. Okay." Jason held out his hands like a conductor, and he tamped the rest of them into silence. "I've got another one." When their laughter simmered down to aching smiles and tear-pricked glimmers in their eyes, he fixed Elizabeth with a challenging stare. "Dad or—"_

_"__Well, this one will be a no-brainer." Henry reached under the table and squeezed Elizabeth's thigh, just above the knee, causing Elizabeth to smile and roll her eyes at him._

_Jason's gaze flicked to Henry. "Wait for it." When Henry held to his silence, Jason returned to Elizabeth. The challenge in his eyes took on a sharp edge. "Dad…or Buttercup?"_

_"__Oooooh." Stevie and Alison chorused. They leant into their arms where they were folded atop the table, whilst their eyes swivelled to Elizabeth, alight and goading._

_Elizabeth opened her mouth without thought. But then she caught herself and stopped. She pursed her lips, and her gaze sailed away across the kitchen._

_Silence. A snicker._

_Henry's hand retreated from her thigh. "Seriously?" He arched his eyebrows at her. "You're actually having to think about it?"_

_"__What…?" She looked at him, all innocence, and squeezed his hand where it now rested atop the table. "Of course I was going to say you…"_

_Then she turned to the kids and pulled an awkward face, her expression on a par with her hooking her index finger beneath the neck of her tee and tugging it loose to the side—_Oy. Narrowly avoided that one.

_Henry sank back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He frowned at Elizabeth, whilst the kids collapsed into peals of laughter._

Elizabeth was still petting the horse when the soft tread of footsteps over the winter-hardened lawn and Dr Sherman's voice reached out to her. "Elizabeth…I see you've met Combray."

Elizabeth twisted around, but kept stroking the horse as she nuzzled against her.

Dr Sherman clasped the folds of her charcoal grey cardigan together in front of her. She pointed vaguely across the field beyond the split-rail fence, where the grass rolled up to the shallow swell of a hill and then tumbled away from sight. "She belongs to the ranch down the road, but is in the habit of escaping their lower field and turning up here every other month or so."

Elizabeth raised her shoulders as she turned her head from side to side. "Well, you know what they say: the grass is always greener…"

Combray nodded her head, brushed up against Elizabeth, and nickered.

Dr Sherman smiled at them both—Or perhaps just at Elizabeth. But if that were the case, Elizabeth would share the smile with Combray.—and then she tilted her head towards the clinic. "Are you ready?" Though the sunlight was already beginning to bleed from the sky, the elongated silver teardrops of her earrings still caught a shimmer.

"I don't suppose we can talk out here instead?"

"Ma'am—" Matt had been surveying the surroundings, looking anywhere except at Elizabeth and Dr Sherman, who had apparently both taken on a miraculous transparence, but now his frown-laden gaze sharpened on Elizabeth. "You're in a clear line of fire. If anyone were to come across the fields, I couldn't ensure your safety."

Elizabeth stared at him. Incredulous. "Because the assassin is seriously in league with shotgun-toting ranchers? And the horse is just a ploy to lure me out here?"

"Can't be too safe, ma'am."

Elizabeth's mouth hung open whilst she struggled to identify at what point they had descended into outright paranoia. _God, the Russians better come through with Volkov so this can finally all be over._

Dr Sherman's smile softened, almost apologetic. "I think inside will be more private."

* * *

**3:08 PM**

"You grew up on a horse farm, didn't you?" Dr Sherman settled into one of the armchairs in the therapy room, and perched near the front edge. The stale aroma of coffee from previous sessions already hung in the air, but it faded into the background as the fresh bloom from the two steaming mugs on the coffee table wafted up to displace it.

Elizabeth lowered herself onto the couch. The leather, normally chill, held a certain warmth after the brisk air outside, the memory of which still tingled on in her skin. "I did."

"What was that like?"

"Hard work." Elizabeth picked up her mug. The coffee scalded like heat-laced needles through the ceramic. She eased herself back to lean against the cushions behind, and then adjusted her grip on the mug, one hand clutching the handle, the forefinger and thumb of the other steadying it by the brim. "Kids complain about having to take out the trash, or empty the dishwasher, or tidy their bedrooms, but I had to get up early every morning to fill up the water barrels, load hay bales onto the truck to take out to the fields, or muck out the stables before school. Could be why I love a lie-in whenever I get the chance now."

Dr Sherman's gaze dipped to the notebook balanced in her lap, and using the navy blue ribbon that slithered out from between the pages, she levered it open. The spine cracked as she folded back the cover. "And after your parents died? Did you get to stay there?"

An ache rippled through Elizabeth, even now. It felt like her heart became a cavern that pumped out a wave of emptiness. Not as strong as it had once been, but whatever it lost in sorrow, it gained in guilt. _How, even for a moment, could she let herself forget?_

"No." The lights overhead reflected off the surface of her coffee in puddles of yellow; she stared down at them as she shook her head. "Everything had to be sold. The house. The horses. Most of their possessions."

"I imagine that must have been hard for you and your brother."

_Hard is someone missing a grade by a single point and failing to get into their first choice college; losing your parents, your home, everything you've ever known is…_

Elizabeth forced a smile. It must have looked at least as grim as it tasted. "We got through it." Before Dr Sherman could say anything else and bring up anymore of a topic that she had, up until then, so skilfully managed to sidestep, she nodded towards the notebook. "So, what's the verdict?"

Dr Sherman clutched her hands atop the splayed pages. "I had a meeting with the rest of the staff to discuss your progress…"

Elizabeth's breath quietened. She had been torn between whether or not she truly wanted to go home yet—or more accurately, torn between wanting to go home and the anxiety that surrounded it—but at Dr Sherman's hesitant expression, like someone about to navigate her way through a particularly thorny subject, (think bilateral talks with Minister Chen on human rights issues just a day after an exposé into the state of America's prison system), her stomach slumped like water-logged sand and she was hit by the dual realisation that she was about to be denied it and, in turn, just how much she wanted it. "They don't think I'm ready yet, do they?"

"Actually, they're in agreement with me."

Her eyebrows shot up. "Seriously?"

Dr Sherman smiled at her and nodded. "You're doing well, you're actively engaging in our sessions, you're sleeping without medication, your mood is no longer a concern, you've made huge progress in processing this trauma…" Dr Sherman drew her hands apart and brought them back together again over her notebook. "We think it would be beneficial for you to return to your normal environment so that we can see how you manage stressors and triggers at home and at work…"

Dr Sherman continued talking. Something about outpatient appointments. A lot of outpatient appointments. Thank God Blake's superpower was finding time in Elizabeth's schedule, because they were sure as hell going to need it.

"But I can go home?" Elizabeth asked when Dr Sherman had finished.

"I'm not sure what the arrangement will be with your security, but yes."

"When?"

"We were thinking the end of the week."

Elizabeth's mind scrambled whilst days and dates slipped away from her grasp. One day bled into the next, into the next, into the next at the clinic, with nothing to differentiate them. Trying to get a hold on exactly where they were in the calendar felt as challenging as trying to hook fragments of eggshell out of egg white using a teaspoon.

Her grip on the coffee mug tightened, and she raised her gaze to Dr Sherman. "It's my daughter's birthday on Thursday. I'd like to be there."

"We can aim for Thursday morning." Dr Sherman met her with a steady smile.

But the longer the smile lingered, the more that hesitant expression seeped back in, as though the smile had only ever been a thin coat of whitewash for the stains that lurked beneath.

Elizabeth waited for it. "But…?"

Dr Sherman conceded that with the flash of a taut smile, like someone had yanked on strings attached to either corner of her lips. "There's one more thing I'd like for us to address before I sign you off." She paused for a second; the lull felt as heavy as a held breath. "Yesterday evening, I had a call from your brother saying that he'd like to come visit you."

Elizabeth lifted her coffee mug to her lips. With steam still spiralling up from the surface, it was still far too hot to drink, but with a chill unfurling at the pit of her stomach, the distraction was welcome. "Well, that doesn't sound like Will. At all."

"Given that the last time the two of you spoke was the day of the poisoning and that seeing him again could bring up a lot of challenging emotions for you, I thought it might be best if you met in a neutral environment, where I'll be able to support you."

The sip near scalded the roof of her mouth. She winced and probed the heat-tender patch with the tip of her tongue whilst she lowered the mug to her knees. "You mean the guilt I feel over him being in the position to be poisoned, the guilt I feel for literally handing him poisoned food, or the guilt I feel over giving up on him when I had the solution that could wake him up from his coma?"

Dr Sherman's expression returned to neutral, applied like natural-look makeup. "As I said, it could be useful to explore that in a more controlled environment."

Elizabeth couldn't avoid Will forever, and even if she could, she couldn't say that she would want to. Her palms sweated against the mug, and before it could slip from her grasp, she leant forward and clunked it down onto the glass-topped coffee table. She rubbed the slick film free from her palms against the rough denim of her jeans. "When?"

"He said that he could visit tomorrow."

"And so long as I don't freak out, I can go home the day after?"

"If we have a plan in place for your outpatient appointments and an understanding that they're a priority, then I'll let Russell know that you're fit to return to work."

Talk to Will. Go home. Move on. Simple…

Silence spread through the room like frost fractals across the surface of a lake.

Dr Sherman studied her. "What are you thinking?"

"I want to see him, it's just…"

The smell of horsehair that lingered on Elizabeth's hands and that had threaded into the weave of her cardigan now sharpened in her nose. A sweet tug. It pulled her back. Back to the horse farm where they'd grown up. To returning there just before she awoke from the coma. To Will saying goodbye and telling her to let go. To coming round in the hospital and finding out that he was still alive. To believing that there was still a chance. To clinging to that chance…

_Take care of yourself, Lizzie_.

She'd known all along what he would have wanted, what he would have expected her to do.

She looked to Dr Sherman. "I'm not worried that seeing him will be triggering. I'm worried how he'll react to me ending up here, when he would have wanted me to move on."

Elizabeth didn't have a clue how Will did it.

How he expected her to just let him go.

* * *

**Jay**

**5:22 PM**

"Hey, man."

At Matt's voice, Jay glanced up from the reams of paperwork—somewhere beneath which he believed he'd discover his desk, if only he had the mind to dig deep enough—to find Matt leant in the doorway, one hand wrapped around the steel pull handle that stretched the length of the glass.

Matt jerked his head towards the corridor, where other staffers were already streaming towards the elevators in their twos and threes, bundled up in quilted trench coats or longline woollen jackets, bobble hats and chunky-knit scarves. "The rest of us were talking about grabbing a drink—something of the alcoholic persuasion—to celebrate the BSR announcement. You in?"

"Can't tonight." Jay's voice dragged as he joggled some of the sheets together and stuffed them into one of the manila files. "I've got Chloe."

"Yeah… I was going to ask…"

A pause. Laughter wafted through from another realm and fractured the silence.

Matt prodded at his glasses. "How's that going?"

Jay chucked the file towards the edge of the paperwork landslide. It slapped down, skidded towards the cusp of the precipice, and then teetered there. "It's not."

He rocked back in his chair, laid his forearms along the armrests, and clutched the ends where the gritted plastic curved downwards. He gave a shrug. It was meant to be nonchalant but it ended up forced and stilted. "Turns out it's not a negotiation. There's a better chance of Russia joining NATO than Abby giving an inch."

"Dude… I'm sorry."

Jay pulled a face and waved it aside. _It's nothing_. Though it really wasn't nothing, but the last thing he needed was pity on top of everything else. He motioned for Matt to take a seat in one of the black leather armchairs on the opposite side of the desk. "It wouldn't be half as bad if I didn't find myself agreeing with everything she's saying." He leant forward, and propped his elbows against the strewn pages that blanketed the desk. His hands made vague gestures. "She's found a great school for Chloe, her mom's planning to move out there too, Chloe will be close to her cousins…"

"What about visitation?" Matt perched at the edge of the armchair, one hand gripping the armrest whilst the other smoothed his navy blue tie to his chest. Behind him the glass door scuffed shut across the carpet and then juddered against its frame.

"I can hardly fly across the country every time I want to see her—not with this job—and she certainly can't go back and forth. It's bad enough her moving between two homes in DC. She needs a stable environment."

"And the guy?"

"Piers?" Jay paused. It stung to admit it. "Perfect." He ought to be glad that Abby and Chloe had a decent guy in their life—and he was glad, even if sometimes that sentiment was hidden in a seething mire of resentment—but it hurt nonetheless. "It's like Abby plucked him straight out of the pages of a women's magazine, a compilation of all the traits you could want in a guy. He's great. So great that every time I see him, it's like I simultaneously want to buy him a beer and punch him. And if I did punch him, he'd probably take all the blame and then buy me a beer to make up for it."

Matt smirked, but tried his best to conceal it. "So, we're back to you moving too."

Jay shook his head. He lowered his gaze to the mess of paper. "I don't want to give up my job and move to California just to do something I don't care about. I mean, working at State is a heart attack waiting to happen and the pay would barely cover the medical bills, but at least we get the chance to make a real difference in the world." Then he stopped. A job he didn't care about in return for the daughter he very much cared about? A frown crumpled his brow as he looked up at Matt. "Does that make me a bad parent?"

Matt met him with a solemn expression. "It makes you human."

But it felt like being human, being fallible, wasn't good enough when you were a parent.

Jay drowned that thought with a swig from his two-hour old mug of coffee—the coffee too cold, the milk too tepid—and then grimaced as the sour-bitter taste clung to the back of his tongue. He spun around, clunked the mug down on the cabinet behind, and then returned to Matt. "It feels like everyone expects you just to drop everything for your child. Maybe you should. I don't know. I suppose as a father I don't know the half of it, but I still don't want to be a deadbeat dad."

Matt wrinkled his nose. "You are definitely _not_ a deadbeat dad. I mean, the fact that the decision is troubling you so much shows that."

"But shouldn't the decision be easier? Shouldn't I want to do what's right for Chloe and put her first, even if it's not what I want?"

"Sometimes doing what's best for you is what's best for her."

Jay paused. He turned the phrase over in his mind. It felt like a conjunction or preposition was missing. His eyes narrowed on Matt. "Can we please not talk in riddles?"

Matt hunched forward in his seat, and rested his elbows atop his thighs. His gaze lifted and locked on Jay's over the thick rims of his glasses. "Look, you can be present for Chloe without being there physically, but you can't be present for her if you're all bitter and twisted with resentment over having to give up the job you love and a shot at the White House in order to follow her across the country." He flapped one hand at Jay—apparently a nod to the epitome of bitter and twisted resentment. Then he raised his shoulders and gave a shake of the head. "Some people have no choice but to be a long-distance parent, but they still make it work."

Jay frowned. "So…you think I should stay?"

Matt smiled at him—a smile that said he realised Jay would love nothing more than for him to make the decision for him. "I think it's complicated, and I think it's not all black and white. I also think it's okay to cut yourself some slack, and if you try one thing and it doesn't work out, you can always try something else further down the line."

Jay drummed his fingers against the armrest. The frown still sat heavy on his brow. The decision felt all or nothing, it felt now or never. After weeks of debating it from every angle, Matt's take on it felt too simplistic, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't fault it.

"The hardest part of a decision is making it. But once you commit to it, you'll find a way to make it work. And if it doesn't work, you'll move on to plan B…" Matt paused for a moment, and then tilted his head to one side. "Or C, or D, or E… If working at State teaches you anything, it's how to come up with a hundred contingencies and keep persevering until you find the right fit."

"I thought it taught us that we're never more than one bad phone call away from Armageddon, nuclear or otherwise, and that drinking port after a state dinner is never a good idea, unless you want schooling in a whole new level of diplomacy." God, he hoped that story never made it into the secretary's memoirs.

Matt chuckled, and then nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "That too."

Jay's gaze drifted to the photo frame that sat at the edge of his desk and that peaked up above the swathes of paperwork like a wooden hut protruding from an avalanche. It was a black and white photograph of Chloe blowing dandelion seeds towards the camera; her eyes crossed with intent, her hair a beautifully tangled mess. How to be present without being there physically? How to keep his daughter and his job?

His gaze flitted back to Matt. "So, we're down to parenting via Skype?"

Matt shrugged. The glints of a smile danced in his eyes. "Gotta embrace the technology." The lightness in his expression lingered, though something about his look sobered too. "If you want my opinion, the best possible thing for Chloe is that her dad is happy and emotionally present for her. All you have to do is to decide whether you can do that best from DC or from California."

_DC or California? DC or California?_

Jay's gaze drifted back to the photograph. Chloe believed that blowing dandelion seeds would grant her whatever it was that she wished for. Jay didn't know what he would wish for. To go back in time? Maybe. But then again, he doubted things would turn out any different. Not unless he quit the job years ago, which he couldn't say he would have done, even knowing what he knew now. Perhaps all he could wish for was to see into the future and know which choice would be best for her now. But that was equally impossible.

The Skype suggestion had been Abby's idea of a compromise. He'd railed against it at the time. It felt wrong to parent over a screen when he ought to be able to see Chloe in person. But at the same time, the promise of being able to talk to Chloe every night over Skype and read her a bedtime story might possibly be more contact than he was managing at the moment.

And if that didn't work out? If he wasn't happy, or if Chloe needed more?

Matt was right. He could quit and be on a plane tomorrow.

The dandelion seed head had started as a single entity, but with one breath it scattered into a hundred possibilities. One problem, multiple answers. And as he stared at the photograph it dawned on him that Matt was right about another thing too: it wasn't black and white after all. The photo, like so much else, was infinite in its shades of greyscale.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	73. Chapter Seventy-One: that wasn't them

**Chapter Seventy-One**

**…****that wasn't them.**

**Elizabeth**

**Wednesday, 12th December, 2018**

**3:31 AM**

The shadows in Elizabeth's room hung with the looming rigidity of starched sheets strung from a washing line on an airless day. Elizabeth rolled over again, this time onto her back. No more than a minute could have passed, yet it felt like each second ached through the minutiae of a lifetime. Without the comfort of the cold glare of street lamps outside or the phosphorescent glow of her alarm clock at home, the only light came from the mute glimmer that seeped through the privacy slats that striped the window set two-thirds of the way up the door. The thin yellow rays fell in hazy bars cut with shadows that crept across the carpet, distorted their way onto the end of her bed and stopped just below the knee. She hugged her arms atop the quilt and stared up at the ceiling. Swirls of plaster eddied into oblivion, disrupted only by the occasional jagged peak; stalactites of paint like the ones she used to snap off when she'd been assigned a top bunk in her junior year at Houghton Hall. The faint patter of rain tickled the window, and from the distance there came a subtle squeak followed by a clacking sound, like a shutter wafting in the breeze. The clock echoed out too as it glared down at her from the strip of wall above the door. Each _clonk…clonk….clonk…_ unrolled into a short forever and reverberated off the inside of her skull.

_'__Thanks for lunch, by the way.'_ Will's voice circled through her mind, at once clear, and then dying away like the swirls of plaster.

Its fade gave rise to her own. '_Not exactly nice and normal.'_

_'__No… But that's not us.'_ Will's voice wisped away again.

This time Henry's took over. _'There's a lot riding on your relationship with Will.'_

_'__We're finally in a good place, and if I do this, if I run, everything will change—'_

Elizabeth peeled back the quilt and tossed it towards the wall that pushed up against the single bed. She curled her body up to sitting and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. Her head swam from the movement—it felt like her brain had been dunked in a vat of warmed grape jello and it was drifting in inertia—whilst her ribs groaned and tightened like flexing fingers. She hunched at the edge of the bed, and waited for everything to settle.

When she felt about eighty-eight per cent sure that standing up wouldn't see her vision succumb to starbursts of black hazed with orange coronae nor her legs give way beneath her like dune sand, she eased up from the mattress and stumbled towards the door, pausing only to grab the cardigan that she'd dumped in a bundle on the seat of the spindle-back chair in the corner.

The door opened and closed with no more than a scuff and a soft click as the bottom edge dragged across the carpet and she guided it back into the frame, but in the light-starved hush each sound felt a hundred times louder, as though the gasp of a single breath would ripple out and be heard for kilometres around. Even the tacking of her footsteps against the tract of linoleum expanded to fill the corridor as she padded through the shadows and towards the grungy yellow glow of the stairwell at the end.

Downstairs, her fingers groped across the wall of the patients' lounge until they found the cold kiss of the light switch. Whilst the fluorescent strips overhead blinked into life, she shuffled over to the kitchenette crammed into one corner. It was more of a countertop really, no more than three units long, with a crumb-laden toaster, a white plastic kettle (possibly a travel kettle) and a manual 700 watt microwave which took about half an hour to render a bowl of soup even lukewarm. She flipped on the faucet—the gush of water drowned out the patter of the rain against the window and the churning silence of her own thoughts—and then filled the kettle to the one cup mark.

Whilst the kettle clunked and spat and hissed like at any moment it might either die or explode, she tugged open one of the cupboards below the units and stooped down. A cardboard box of chamomile teabags hid at the back, tucked away behind a plastic tub filled with sachets of instant coffee—the same bland yet bitter ones provided by hotels. She reached one of the teabags out and dropped it into a cup lifted from the mug tree next to the toaster.

Two minutes fourteen seconds later—or so said the clock which hung above the stone blue sofa that slouched against the wall—the kettle switch flipped up and the bubbling settled to a low roil. She poured out the water until the cup was full, just shy of the brim. The teabag floated to the surface whilst the steam billowed. She picked up a stray teaspoon from the counter, and then lifted the mug and kept her gaze half on the goldening surface, half on the blur of the path ahead as she padded back to her room.

She only hoped that sleep would follow.

* * *

**2:51 PM**

Ash grey clouds hung in canopies like teased out wads of cotton wool over the car park of the clinic. The branches of the black walnut tree writhed in the loose breeze, and they stirred up a jitter at the pit of Elizabeth's stomach as she perched on the arm of the couch in the therapy room and stared out through the window towards the steel blue hatchback that bobbed and sailed along the track. The sound of gravel churning beneath the tyres grew from a whisper to a roar, and the jitter in her stomach crescendoed in sync. It didn't quieten, though, when the car whined to a stop in one of the bays parallel to the window, the engine puttered into silence, and a few seconds later, Will climbed out; instead, it spread as a tingle into the tips of her fingers, then prickled and bled into numb.

She curled her fingers around the cuffs of her sweatshirt and tucked her fists beneath her elbows. The pressure of her arms across her chest was just enough to remind her of the bruises that lay beneath, like the tug of a memory not quite recalled. When Will slammed the car door shut and scrunched towards the entrance, she tore her gaze away from him and looked to Dr Sherman, who sat in the armchair opposite. "That's him. That's Will."

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine." Elizabeth gave a quick nod.

It wasn't a lie, not really. She would be fine, she and Will would be fine, she would get through the session all whilst being fine, then tomorrow she would be fine to go home.

Minutes, maybe hours later, there came a rap at the door.

Elizabeth rose from her perch and twisted around. Her hands fell to her sides, and with her fingers still curled around the ends of her sleeves, the heavyweight cotton cushioned her palms as her nails bit half-crescents into them.

A pause.

Amy's figure blocked the long rectangular window set into the door. A moment later, at a word from Dr Sherman—what exactly she said, Elizabeth couldn't be sure; the voice came as though through water—the door whooshed open. Amy stepped aside, her arm outstretched and propping the door wide. She might have offered Elizabeth a taut smile, but Elizabeth couldn't be sure of that either. The young woman was a blur of dark hair, neon specs and denim.

All she could see was Will. Alive. Awake. And standing there.

His khakis hung looser than before, his green-grey jacket at least a size too big; though, having seen him return from long stints in Syrian refugee camps, she'd been prepared for worse. And anything was better than how he'd looked on the ICU, where gaunt would have been a miracle.

He stepped inside with a murmur of thanks to Amy, and stopped just far enough into the room that Amy could pull the door shut behind him. He kept his chin turned to his shoulder, as if he were keeping one eye on the door as it closed, though Elizabeth got the distinct feeling that he was using it as a prop to delay having to look at her. But that was good too, right? Avoidance. Deflection. A power struggle. That was them. Who needed nice and normal?

The door clunked into the frame. Will continued to watch it out the corner of his eye for a second that strung out into an hour. The jitter had crept into Elizabeth's chest too, or perhaps that was all the caffeine from the five or so cups of coffee she'd downed since seven o'clock that morning, and her fingers curled tighter into the cuffs that cushioned her sweat-slicked palms.

When Will turned and met her eye, blue echoing off blue, her breath stilled and stuck high in her chest. The silence in the room was so thick that it reflected sound. Even the _clonk, clonk, clonk_ of the clock above the door was lost.

Both of them froze. It felt like they were locked in a standoff on opposite sides of a chasm, both of them waiting for the other to make the first move and show his or her hand. _He who speaks first, loses._

But: _She who dares, wins_. Right?

Elizabeth jerked her head towards the steel blue hatchback parked on the other side of the window. "Should you really be driving?"

Will frowned and drew his chin back, sending her a look of faux bemusement as he countered, "Shouldn't you be in a straitjacket?"

A second hung between them. Exquisite in its silence.

Then the corners of his lips quirked into a smile.

And the chasm between them collapsed.

Elizabeth rushed over and threw her arms around him. She closed her eyes as she clung to him, her fingers scrabbling for a hold on the back of his jacket, whilst his arms wrapped around her in a tight embrace. Her ribs ached as she pressed on her bruises, but she didn't care. She needed to feel his warmth, to breathe him in, to know that this was real, that he was there, safe and alive, not a dream that would evaporate the moment she awoke. The last time she'd hugged anyone was over four weeks ago, when Henry had said goodbye, and only in that moment now did it hit her how much she craved that touch. It felt like she'd been starved, and now, given the opportunity to replenish, she couldn't get enough.

But that wasn't them…

She pushed him away and shoved his shoulder. "Don't you ever do that to me again."

He frowned. "I didn't do anything to you."

"You didn't wake up." Her voice cracked.

He strolled past her and towards the couch. He unroped his black and white checked scarf from around his neck, his back to her as he spoke. "I'm not going to apologise for my neuronal activity being temporarily suppressed—"

"Your neuronal activity's always been a bit suppressed, if you ask me," she muttered.

He raised his voice and drowned out hers. "And believe it or not, willpower isn't a medically recognised treatment for comas—" He shot her a pointed look over his shoulder. "—and nor, might I add, is shouting at the patient."

Elizabeth's lips pursed and her brow pinched. A blush threatened her cheeks, but she fought it off. With her hands on her hips, she narrowed her eyes on Will. "Henry told you?"

"No." He tossed the scarf down onto the couch. "But it doesn't take an ex-CIA analyst to guess that shouting at me would be your go-to response." He leant across the coffee table, his hand outstretched, whilst he gave Dr Sherman a smile that went way beyond sincere and landed somewhere around 'unsettling'. "Hi, I'm Will. You must be Lizzie's shrink."

Elizabeth flapped him aside. "Ignore him."

She padded over to the couch and sank down onto the cushions at the near end. She sat sideways with one leg crossed in front of her, the other dangling over the edge with the ball of her foot pressed to the carpet, so that she faced Will as he lowered himself onto the opposite end. She lifted her coffee mug from the glass top. But then it hit her—

She reached forward and slapped his arm.

"Ow." He recoiled.

"What happened to your Secret Service agents?"

His had been the only car to pull up in the car park; the plainclothes officers Russell had assigned him were meant to follow him everywhere.

"You mean those goons you had lurking around my car and spying on my house?" He shucked off his jacket behind him, and then twisted around and slung it over the arm of the sofa, along with the scarf. "You might want to tell them to expand their plainclothes repertoire beyond plaid shirts and jeans; they stick out like lumberjacks at a banking conference."

"They're not spying on you."

He leant into the corner of the couch, his arm rested along the back. His shoulders flinched in a shrug. "Not anymore, they're not."

She paused. The pinch in her brow and the narrowing of her eyes returned. "You didn't."

"I'm not having people follow me around everywhere I go just to appease your paranoia." He wafted a hand at her, head to toe and back again, as though she were surrounded in a fog of the stuff.

"It's not paranoia if it's true, _Will_. There are people out there who will hurt you."

"The only reason anyone's interested in me is so that they can get to you. Apparently little brother of the secretary of state doesn't quite make the cut on the hit list, or at least not according to the FBI who accused me of facilitating some wacko's desire to poison the president's golden child."

She shook her head to herself and raised her mug to her lips. "Here we go."

"And isn't that a little rich coming from you? You expect everyone else to be cloistered away and stalked by the Secret Service, meanwhile you're out getting yourself shot."

Elizabeth's throat clenched around the swallow of coffee; it elicited a sharp wince. She lowered her mug to rest against the knee bent in front of her; its weight and heat pressed through her jeans, uncomfortable against the bone. "You're not meant to know about that."

"Oh, well, I guess it didn't happen then." He leant forward and snatched the mug from her. "Just like you didn't exhaust yourself to the point of a breakdown by obsessing over looking after me, only to wind up wanting to top yourself."

He held her gaze over the brim as he took a long sip.

A prickle of heat crawled up her neck. There was something goading about his stare, as though he were daring her to deny it. But how could she? The most she managed was a murmur. "I wasn't 'obsessing'."

He continued to eye her. Perhaps he thought it wasn't worth his breath arguing her on the definition of 'obsessing'.

When he lowered the mug, she held out her hand and fluttered her fingers towards her palm, beckoning for it back. She cradled its warmth to her chest. A shield as much as a comfort. In the silence, her fingers plucked and flexed against the ceramic. Then, when a sharp edge infiltrated the look in Will's eyes, like the spurs on crystals of ice, her fingers stilled and her grip on the mug tightened and she braced herself for whatever might come next.

With his gaze still locked on hers, he jerked his head to the side, towards where Dr Sherman sat in one of the armchairs and silence. "I had a chat with Dr Sherman here, and she tells me that apparently you're all better and you're ready to go home… But the truth of it is—" The ghost of a smile lifted the corners of his lips, stinging with its cynicism. "—you haven't really changed at all."

Elizabeth scoffed, though a quiver of unease caused her to shift in her seat. "Oh, and you would know, having spent all of—what?—three minutes? with me."

"Having spent the best part of fifty years with you." A clench tightened his jaw; it darkened his whole expression. "I know you, Lizzie Adams—"

"McCord."

"—and I know that you're just the same as you were on the day we were poisoned, and that's how I know that, despite whatever you've led everyone here to believe, if the same thing were to happen again next week, there's not a single thing you'd do different." He gestured at her, a swift up and down. "None of this is to do with you feeling guilty over what happened; this is all just a symptom of your obsession with putting other people first."

Irritation simmered up like a deep buried itch that yearned for the surface. Not at him, but at what he said. And not because it dashed aside all the progress she'd made in the past few weeks, all the hours she'd spent talking her mouth and soul dry in session after session, all the flurries of panic and unwanted memories she'd put herself through, but because she couldn't tell him it wasn't true. Even if something happened unrelated to her, a freak accident that left him comatose, she couldn't say she wouldn't do everything in her power to help him, even if it meant exhausting herself.

But that's what people do: Take care of the ones they love.

Her voice shot up and strained from the effort. "You were in a coma, Will. You were going to die or spend the rest of your life like that. Did you seriously expect me not to care?"

His voice rose to match. And whatever simmered inside her wasn't half of what simmered in his eyes. "There's a difference between you caring about me and you putting my life above your own… And I'm not prepared to put up with it anymore."

"What?" Her brow furrowed.

"You need to stop treating me like your responsibility."

"I don't treat you like a responsibility. You're my brother, and I love you."

He was meant to say that she was his sister and he loved her too. But that wasn't them either. Instead, he kept his distance, physically and otherwise, leant back in the corner of the couch, his gaze a frosted laser beam on her. "How'd you think it would have made me feel to come round from a coma not only to find out that you'd done something to yourself in the meantime, but to learn that the something you did was because you couldn't handle the thought of losing me?"

It struck a nerve she didn't even know she had, like an echo without an originating sound. Neither one of them wanted to be the last Adams standing; she strove to protect him, whilst he endangered himself with his reckless regard to life. It felt like they were fighting on the same side of opposite wars. But to abandon him like that? She wouldn't—couldn't—do it. No matter how bad she felt, she knew that to be true, even if she didn't know how she knew. It was something that just was. As intangible as the thing people called love.

She slid her hand across the rough-polished leather of the couch. "Will…I'm fine."

But he didn't so much as acknowledge the gesture. "Until the next time that something happens to me. Then what?"

She had no response. Not one that he'd want to hear, not one that she wanted to admit, not one that would see her returning home tomorrow.

He broke their gaze and pretended to examine the buttons on the front of his shirt instead. He did that sometimes, when he had something to say that he knew she wouldn't like. "Look, Lizzie, maybe I could just about tolerate your lifelong fear of losing me when it meant you were interfering with my life, but I'm not going to keep enabling you if it means that you end up like this."

"_Enabling_ me?" She drew her hand back from where it rested between them.

"Go home if you want, do whatever you like—" He flapped his hand towards the window, and his shoulders jerked in a shrug that said he couldn't care less. "—but I'm not going to be a part of it."

It didn't make any sense, or at least, the only sense it made wasn't something she was prepared to accept. "You're not serious. Will, come on—"

This time he met her eye. The look was so cold it made the hairs of her arms prickle beneath her sweater. "If me being around you leads to you having a breakdown, then I'm not going to stick around and watch you destroy yourself."

"I'm not _destroying_ myself."

"Risking your job, your family, your health?"

Her mouth hung open. One second, two seconds, three… Then— "I'm your _sister_, Will… You can't just cut me out."

"I can, and I will, unless you stop putting me first." He twisted around and picked up his scarf and jacket. He slung them over one arm and pushed himself up from the sofa.

Elizabeth's mind flailed as much as it did when she found herself swept into panic; it felt like they'd gone from zero to one hundred in less than a second, and she had no idea how or why or even what vehicle they were in. He couldn't be serious. He couldn't honestly think he could cut her out just like that. Surely he couldn't want to…

She looked up at him. Her gaze hardened. Her fingers wrapped around the coffee mug so tight that her knuckles blanched. Had she been wearing her rings, they would have pinched the bone. "You're just saying this to hurt me."

A bitter smile stained his lips, as though he found some kind of macabre humour in that. He shook his head to himself. "Lizzie…why on earth would I want to hurt you?"

"Because you can't stand the fact that I was right about the treatment, about the salmon…" Her eyes narrowed, as though honing in on a glimmer of the truth. "You can't stand it that I was the one who found the study that saved you." She thrust one hand at him. "God forbid the narcissist should be humbled or have to say thank you."

Silence reverberated through the room. Sinusoidal waves bouncing from wall to wall.

Will continued to stare down at her, a hint of that smile still lingering, though twice as bitter as before. "If we were back there right now, you'd eat all of the pasta…wouldn't you?"

"Of course." The response slipped from her tongue. Her eyes bugged at him. "That's what any normal person would do."

He raised his eyebrows a fraction. The look questioned her definition of 'normal'.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek and resisted the urge to point out that that only showed how much of a narcissist he truly was. Any normal person would be willing to sacrifice himself for someone he loved.

She swept a hand towards him. "If you had the choice between Annie being hurt or you being hurt, hands down, you'd pick you."

"But if Annie were hurt, I'd look after myself so that I could look after her."

"What? And I didn't?"

"Henry told me you were barely eating or sleeping."

She looked away. Her gaze settled on the floor beneath the coffee table, the carpet watery with the yellow light that diffused through the glass. The ends of her hair quivered as she shook her head—Henry had obviously been talking _way_ too much_._ "It's not my fault if I felt nauseous."

"And refusing to sleep?" The arch in his eyebrow infiltrated his tone.

She shot him a look. _As if he knew_. "I didn't refuse to sleep. I couldn't sleep because I was worrying about you." She turned away again, another shake of the head. Her voice softened to little more than a murmur. "And if I did sleep I'd just wake up in a panic, or have nightmares…"

"So why didn't you ask for help? Why didn't you tell Henry you were struggling rather than waiting until you'd 'given up hope', as he so euphemistically put it?"

Her jaw clenched, her gaze steeled on him, and the words spewed out faster than a stream of thought. "Because if I'd told Henry anything, then he would've insisted that I go straight back to therapy and there's no way he would have let me stay there and look after you."

Silence followed. It flowed thick through the room.

Somewhere deep inside the coils of Elizabeth's mind, a panic alarm rang: Wrong answer. Wrong answer. Wrong answer.

But it was too late; she couldn't take it back now.

Will's brow knitted, and he drew his chin in. He gave her a kind of faux puzzled look. "So, you knew that you had a problem, but rather than dealing with it, you thought you'd camp out on an ICU?"

_Yes_, the silence said.

Elizabeth didn't say a word.

"Is that what any normal, healthy person would do?"

He waited for a response that would never come.

The silence said what Elizabeth couldn't bring herself to.

Before, she had told herself that she hadn't reached out because she was protecting herself, because she feared that she'd lose herself in unwanted feelings and memories if she talked. Like dipping her toe in a river, only for the current to drag her out to sea.

It wasn't a lie.

But nor was it the whole truth.

There were plenty of moments at the beginning when she'd known that something was wrong; moments before the thoughts became so insinuating that she no longer had the words to explain just how bad she felt; moments that she could have seized upon and thus changed the way things would unfold. She could have confided in Henry, reached out to Dr Sherman, processed the trauma and her feelings of grief and guilt, found a way to sleep, rebuilt her strength, visited Will like any normal relative would. She still could have found the German study, and when she did, she would have been strong enough to insist that he had the treatment rather than giving up, and then she would have been there at home when the nurses called her to say that he had woken up.

But she hadn't.

Because the whole truth? Not reaching out had never been solely about protecting herself; it had been because something inside her had driven her to put Will first.

And that something was still there. Hidden deep down, like a single black thread woven into what Henry might call her soul. And it told her that perhaps, despite knowing she needed to prioritise herself, if the same thing happened again, she couldn't. Not when it came to Will.

Will placed his hand on her shoulder. He might have squeezed; she didn't know. The touch barely registered through the eiderdown duvet of numb. "You're my sister, Lizzie, and despite what you might think, I love you. But I'm not prepared to keep doing this unless you start putting yourself first. Because if you don't…you're not the only one who'll end up getting hurt."

He leant in and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, lingering there for no more than a moment. A simple gesture. Nice and normal—for anyone else. But for them, it said goodbye. For them, it said he was letting her go. For them, it said that they definitely weren't 'them' anymore.

* * *

"How are you feeling?" Dr Sherman waited until the roar of gravel had died out before she spoke.

The silence had felt appropriate somehow. It held the weight of the hush found at a wake.

Elizabeth opened her mouth. Nothing came. The numbness had seeped deep down into her mind. It had buried her thoughts. She got the sense that they were churning beneath the surface, but she couldn't see them, hear them, summon them. Perhaps that was best for now.

Dr Sherman didn't prompt her. She sat in the armchair opposite, leant back against the leather cushion, with her elbows touched to the armrests and her hands folded neatly atop the notebook in her lap.

Elizabeth stewed in the silence for a while. Even the _clonk, clonk, clonk_ of the clock above the door had been muffled by the hush. She let her gaze drift down to the mug of coffee still cradled in both hands. It might have been lukewarm.

How did she feel? _Like I'd rather I'd had a flashback or panic attack, like I'd rather he blamed me for what happened, like I wish I could say that he was wrong._

After a while, the corners of her lips twinged into a bitter smile, and she looked up. "So…I guess this means I won't be going home after all."

Thank God she hadn't promised Stevie she'd be home for her birthday, and thank God Henry and the kids didn't know she had been within touching distance of being signed off. She didn't need to disappoint anyone else right now.

The ends of Dr Sherman's hair ruffled against the collar of her shirt as she gave a slight shake of the head. "I'm still happy to sign you off."

Elizabeth's brow crumpled into a frown. "You are?

A nod.

The frown deepened. "But…why?"

Dr Sherman gave her a smile that looked as though it was meant to be reassuring. "Your brother made some valid points, albeit in a slightly more confrontational manner than I'd prefer, but that doesn't take away from the progress you've made so far, nor does it change my opinion that you're ready to go home and back to work."

"But…what he said…" He had made it seem like she was a ticking time bomb. In all likelihood, when it came to him, she was.

"The way that you reacted to your brother's illness is something I think it's important for us to explore, but I'm happy for us to do that in your outpatient sessions." Her shoulders lifted towards the swaying silver hoops of her earrings. "Hopefully your brother won't end up in the same situation again, but I'm not going to suggest that you ought to stay here indefinitely in the off-chance that he does, and I think that in any other circumstance you would reach out, and that's what I've been looking for."

Elizabeth paused. She had been prepared to be told she had to stay at the clinic, and now to be told that she could go home after all… She should be thrilled, she should feel that lift in her heart, she should be smiling to herself as she packed her bag and thought about the moment when she was reunited with Henry and the kids, the moment when she was wrapped in their arms. But instead it left her feeling lost. The walls of the clinic felt like a comfort now, like she was adrift and they were the only solid thing that she could hold on to. An embrace of a different sort.

Dr Sherman studied her. It looked as though she'd also been expecting Elizabeth to be ecstatic, and was equally surprised to find that she was not. She tried to hide it beneath a non-judgmental expression though. "Or you can always stay, if you like, and we can work on it here. It's up to you."

Elizabeth shook her head. Home or clinic? Home or clinic? Home or clinic? It felt like a signpost spinning around, and she was waiting for it to stop. It kept on going though, until it felt like it might whip up a vortex and suck her in. "I honestly don't know what I want."

* * *

**11:29 PM**

The plumes of grass whipped at the skin of Elizabeth's calves as she ran across the field. Each ragged breath burned high in her chest, an inferno in which her heart drummed, whilst a metallic tang laced her gum-thick saliva and clogged her throat. Still she ran. Overhead, the stars of the Milky Way seethed and churned, a lasso that roped her in and dragged her on. Beneath her feet, hidden fragments of rock jabbed at her bare soles. Still she ran. The black walnut tree loomed ahead. It welcomed her with open arms. And into those arms she ran.

Time skipped, and she was thrust to the cusp.

Her fingernails scrabbled in the rough grooves of the bark, her fingertips rubbed raw as she fought for a hold.

The chasm below called to her. An insinuating song escaped its yawning jaws. Its shadows reached up and beckoned her into their grasp.

She looked behind her.

She slipped.

She fell.

Down, down, down.

Consumed by the shadows.

* * *

Elizabeth's eyes slammed open. Yet still she fell. Down, down, down. Through the shadows of the room, until her body hit the bed with a lurch. She scrambled up to sitting, and gasped for breaths that wouldn't come. It felt like she was choking on air. Her throat closing on nothingness. Her heart pounded, yet each beat was hollow. She was going to die. She was going to die. She was going to—

_Breathe_. _It's just panic. Breathe._

_In. Two. Three. Four. Hold. Out. Two. Three. Four._

She counted the breaths over and over again.

_It's just panic. It will pass_. _It's just panic. It can't hurt you._

She flailed for an anchor. Something to cling to. Something that would stop her from slipping. The scent of Henry woven into the National War College tee that nestled into the gap between the mattress and the wall; if he had been there, he would have held her with his chest pressed to her back, and counted the breaths for her until she settled into a rhythm to match his own. The thrum of rain as it hammered against the windows, ice-laced needles that jabbed into the glass; a sound that soothed by virtue of reminding her that she was safe inside the room. The pallid glow that snuck through the privacy slats in the door's window; with the press of shadows and with the air so cold that it stung the skin beneath her sweat-soaked tee, the light could almost pass for warmth.

When the feeling subsided, like waves growing shallower with each passing ripple, Elizabeth swung her legs over the side of the bed and stooped there, her fingers wrapped around the edge of the mattress, the balls of her feet pressed to the floor. The images from the dream hung at the fringes of her vision, as palpable as the shadows in the room; it felt as though at any moment they might swoop back in and carry her away with them.

She pushed herself up from the bed—the mattress springs creaked in protest—and she staggered a tipsy path towards the door. The chunky-knit cardigan lay across the seat of the spindle-back chair in the corner; she grabbed it up and tugged it on, and then eased open the door just enough that she could slink out into the corridor.

The cold in the air hung at the nadir between the radiators switching off in the evening and reigniting in the morning, and it held an unfathomable depth, as though warmth was something confined to the past, never to be felt again. She crept towards the stairwell, and as she did, the chill in the linoleum seeped into her toes until the prickle of pins and needles dwindled into numb and it felt like her feet were no longer her own. The rain thundered against the row of windows; it turned the corridor into a tunnel of sound so loud that it drowned out the patter of her thoughts. The dream continued to lurk, though. Not the black of night beyond the windows, but a chasm; not a smooth tract of linoleum floor, but the stubble of the paddock's grass; not cracks in the paint of the whitewashed walls, but branches of the black walnut tree fracturing the sky. She wanted to blame Will, but to do so would only prove him right. She couldn't let him go.

Downstairs, she fumbled for the light switch on the wall of the patients' lounge. The fluorescent strips that lined the ceiling whined and flickered into life. She padded over to the kitchenette, lifted the kettle from its base, flipped on the faucet and filled up the kettle to the two cup mark. Whilst the kettle sputtered and crunkled and spat, she unhooked the largest mug from the tree, and then yanked open the cupboard, stooped down and grabbed the plastic tub from near the back. She prised off the lid. The slender tubes of instant coffee gleamed in the water-thin light. She plucked two of the sachets from the container and tore off both of their tops at once, and then tipped them into the mug. When the kettle had finished threatening to explode, she filled the mug three-quarters of the way full. The remaining quarter she made up with cool water straight from the tap.

The teaspoon clinked off the side of the mug as she swirled it around and around, the sound sharp against the rumble of the rain in the background. She tossed the spoon into the sink with a clatter, and took a sip. The coffee was foul—(Almost as bad as the 'coffee' she'd endured on that trip to China—thank God Blake had smuggled in some freshly ground dark roast arabica coffee beans and a travel cafetière.)—but she forced a gulp down anyway and tried to fight off the grimace that juddered through her jaw. She padded over to the stone blue couch and slumped down onto the fabric cushions.

In front of her, the shelf below the oak-effect coffee table was crammed to bursting with dog-eared books—_The Remains of the Day…Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older_…_The Craft of Thought_…—whilst magazines were strewn in a disjointed peacock's train across the top. All the magazines were months if not years old, torn-edged, and missing substantial chunks, so that they looked as thin the models featured in the articles that some member of staff had been instructed to tear out. It was censorship. She wasn't entirely sure who it served, or if she approved. After all, it wasn't like you could take a redaction marker to people in the street, nor could you stop someone from splurging on those articles the minute they stepped outside the clinic doors. It was something for her to think about though, whilst she cleansed the dream from her mind with swig after swig of coffee, and it was a way for her to whittle down the hours until the time came for her to go home.

She only hoped that, in the meantime, sleep would leave her alone.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	74. Chapter Seventy-Two: a story of subst

**Note:** Thank you for all your comments on 'Dirty Laundry'. I find it hard to judge how effective my own writing is, so all your feedback is very much appreciated.

* * *

**Chapter Seventy-Two**

**…****a story of substance.**

**Stevie**

**9:41 PM**

"Missing Mom?"

Stevie had been staring at the photograph of her mother and Uncle Will as children—a grayscale shot of her mother smiling almost shyly towards the ground, whilst Uncle Will rested his head against her shoulder and beamed at the camera—that was propped on the shelving unit behind the kitchen table, with its array of ceramic vases and plates in every size and colour, dust-thick candles that had never been lit, and atlas-sized tomes that she couldn't recall anyone ever having looked at, but at her father's voice she flinched and her gaze darted away.

With her hands wrapped around the mug of lukewarm tea, she twisted around in her seat and looked to her father. "That obvious, huh?"

Her father placed his own mug of tea down onto the kitchen table, along with his cell phone, and then lowered himself onto the chair at the end. Bags weighed heavy beneath his eyes, emphasised by the thick black rims of his glasses, and the worry lines of his brow seemed deeper in the shadowy light that suffused the kitchen and lounge.

Her fingers flexed around the mug. "You?"

He shrugged and pulled a face that was far too forced_._ "Not at all, I'm totally indifferent."

He attempted a smile, but it went no further than the corners of his lips, and his eyes glistened—the pain they held almost hurt to look at, as though if she were to hold his gaze for long enough, the feeling would diffuse out into the air and rope her in with its aching tug.

She sank back in her seat, until the arced top rail of the chair pressed into the knots of her spine (_Spinous processes_, Jon had informed her as his fingertips traced the curve of her own), and she cradled the mug to her chest. She eyed her father for a moment, and then took a slow sip. "So, is this the part where you give me the big lecture on how inappropriate it is for me to date Jon?"

"In the interest of peace, I thought we'd give that a miss for now," her father said. Then his gaze turned distant, as though he were considering something. With his head cocked to one side, he gave a half-shrug that was mirrored by his lips. "Though I'm glad you at least recognise that it's inappropriate…and also highly unethical…and you can forget peace and diplomacy when your mother finds out."

She shot him a hard stare. "Jon's nice."

"Dr Owens—" His voice strained the way it did when he was trying desperately hard to play it cool, and thus failing. "—was your mother's doctor and your uncle's doctor, he works with your uncle, and I'm pretty sure your mother shouted at him on at least three occasions."

"Well, if we're adding people who Mom's shouted at to the list of guys I can't date, then I'm definitely destined to end up old and single."

"If it were up to me, you wouldn't be allowed to date until you were at least thirty."

She gave him an incredulous look. "You and Mom were already married at my age."

"We were." He conceded that with a soft smile directed at his cup of tea. He paused for a sip and then clunked the mug back onto the wooden tabletop as he swallowed. "But it was a different time. And being so young, it was difficult. We were still kids when we met, and we had a lot of growing up to do. A lot of times that breaks a couple."

"But you made it work."

He met her eye. There was something solemn about his look—not a darkening of the eyes so much as a deepening—something that said she ought to remember this. "We worked at making it work." A second passed, and then he lowered his gaze to the tabletop and gave a slight shake of the head, and the look vanished. "And believe me, it's hard to keep up that commitment day after day, especially on the days when everything feels bleak and you can't see the good days ahead. It requires a lot of trust: in each other, and in the future."

The tip of her thumb rubbed against the brim of the mug. "But it's worth it in the end?"

"At the risk of your mother's 'psychobabble' alarm going off: There is no end, only the now, and the more you work at it and the more you're willing to invest in that commitment, the more good nows you get."

She considered that for a moment, and let her gaze drift across the ornaments that lined the shelves and towards the window where the gauze curtain fluttered in the draught and the darkness outside pressed in. Having a partner who was willing to invest the effort, who was open and honest and didn't flee at the first hurdle, who wanted not the wedding but the marriage…?

She returned to him. "I want that."

"I want that for you too. All of you." He nodded towards the stairs, as though the faint thump of music that flowed down from the bedrooms were a substitute for Alison and Jason.

In the pause that followed, he glanced towards his cell phone. It lay with its screen facing up, the soft sheen of lights dappling off the surface. Every time he did that, a frown nicked his brow. It was like he was demanding to know why it hadn't rung or chimed yet, but also fearing that it might.

She took a long sip of her tea, and watched him over the brim. The tea was milky-sweet, the way her mother used to make it when she was still a child but professed to be too old to drink glasses of plain milk anymore, and it was just the right amount of warm so that it hugged her tongue.

The mug clunked as she placed it down on the table. She leant forward in the seat, and folded her arms against the wood, her shoulders tensed. "How is Mom?"

"I don't know." He picked up the cell phone. "I got two texts from your uncle—" He held the phone away from him and frowned at the screen as he navigated through the threads of messages. "—one saying 'you're welcome', the other saying 'she's just as neurotic as the day you found her'." He clicked the screen off and placed the phone down again. His lips twinged at one side. "Honestly, I'm afraid to ask."

For some reason, she found something vaguely reassuring about the 'neurotic' comment, as though it indicated that her mother had returned to the way she was before the poisoning. But perhaps she was just latching onto anything that resembled hope, like a moth looking for the moon in the bewitching cool blue of a bug zapper.

"So…I guess she won't be making any miraculous appearances tomorrow?"

He gave her a sorry smile. "I don't think so. But you know that she'd be here if she could."

Though she'd expected as much, her chest tweaked with disappointment nonetheless.

But it didn't matter, not really, she was an adult now, not a child, and it wasn't even like she wanted a big fuss on her birthday. After all, people singing to you whilst you sat alone in awkward silence, the constant stream of well-wishing and the forced-smile '_Thank yous_' that made your cheeks ache, being thrust to the centre of that hubbub of attention… It was just a source of embarrassment.

Part of her wouldn't mind her mother embarrassing her right now, though.

She shrugged it off, aiming for nonchalance. The shrug ended up stilted. "She wasn't here for my eighth birthday either. Well not _here_ here, but here as in our home back then."

"She wasn't." Her father spoke towards the cup of tea he corralled with his hands. His voice was steady, controlled. It sounded like he was reading from a script. "She wanted to be though." He met her with that sorry smile again. It strained this time, a touch more bitter, and the pain that simmered in his eyes bubbled up to the surface.

She paused. Her heart thumped against the inside of her ribcage, as though she had just sprinted up the stairs rather than dared herself to ask the question. "Where was she? I mean, I know she was working. But where?"

In the silence, the baseline from the bedrooms bumped down the stairs and filled the air.

Her father held her gaze, but it felt like he was staring straight through her. Sometimes when he did that, it felt as though he were looking at a memory of her mother instead; even more so now that she'd seen the photograph of her mother that President Dalton had given her, taken when her mother was just a couple of years older than she was now, the resemblance undeniable, as much as she'd still love to refute it. No one wanted to be the cue card for someone else's achievements. No one wanted to be the reminder of someone else's loss.

His gaze dipped to his mug. He lifted it to his lips. He paused. "Iraq." He took a swig.

She clutched her own mug. Her fingers plucked at the ceramic. "What happened?"

He returned the mug to the table with an echoing clunk. He held it loosely. The thumb of his left hand slipped behind his palm to nudge at his wedding ring. The ring tilted back and forth, and threw off cold gleams of light.

The silence was as palpable as the chill that seeped in through the windows. It brushed up against her skin and prickled at the hairs of her arms. It set her nerves on end as all kinds of possibilities flooded her mind: Iraq. Torture. _Everything in life is far more complicated than you think it is right now_…

She added in a rush, "Unless you'll get arrested for telling me, or if it's something I really don't want to know about, because if it's anything to do with torture, then I don't think—"

He shook his head. "I won't get arrested, and it's not that."

"Then…?"

"It's not something your mother likes to talk about."

"But you know what happened?"

"I know parts of it, yes. From what she told me, from what President Dalton told me. Over time, I've managed to fill in most of the gaps."

Her lips drew to one side as she remembered their conversation from before, when she'd asked whether her mother ever spoke about her parents. "Like collecting the pieces?"

He gave her a smile. Small but genuine. "I do that with your mother a lot."

She shared in the smile for a moment, and then took a sip from her tea. With her elbows propped against the table, she cradled the mug in front of her chest. "So, can you tell me what happened? Why she 'missed her flight'?"

He leant back in his chair, and rested his arms against the top rail that curved around to the front. His fingers drummed against the wood, and then stilled as he gave a shrug. "Technically she did miss her flight."

He held her gaze for a long moment. Something in his eyes had hardened, like a grey brick wall had risen up, and she got the sense that he was about to launch into a cover story, despite the dramatic build-up, as though she were eight years old again and could be placated with a tale as flimsy as a 'my first chapter book'. She wished she could.

"There was a vehicle that was meant to take Mom and her colleague from the compound where they'd been staying to their transportation out of the country; only, for some reason, there was only space for one of them, Mom or her colleague, her friend, a guy called Eric Mitchell, 'Mitch'." At the name, his fingers flared against the armrest and he gave a shake of the head. "Mom wanted to make sure she was back for your birthday, but Mitch's wife was pregnant and their son was due any day, so Mom told him she would stay and he could go instead."

She waited. Her breath had shallowed until it felt as though it had stopped.

But when seconds had passed and he'd said nothing more, a frown worked its way across her brow. "So, that's it? She missed her flight because she wanted to make sure her friend was back for the birth?"

That definitely wasn't worth the build-up and a 'my first chapter book' had a more solid plot.

He shot her a look. "I wish it had been just that."

He hunched forward in his seat, and propped his elbows against the table, his hands folded beneath his chin. His gaze sailed out through the window at the opposite end, and his eyes reflected the darkness that lurked outside. "Just after Mitch got into the vehicle, it blew up."

Her mind fell silent. It felt like all connection with her body had been cut off.

"Someone who they thought was on their side, someone whom they trusted, placed a bomb beneath it, and when it was about to leave, they detonated it. Everyone inside died. They didn't stand a chance. Fortunately, Mom was far enough back to get away with no more than nasty cuts and bruises, but if she'd been standing any closer, if she'd been hit by larger debris, if they hadn't said there was only space for one of them or if she'd been in the vehicle instead…" The look on his face as he stared vacantly into the night said that the images of those possibilities played out in his mind. The corner of his lips quirked. "It could have been much worse."

He bowed his head and stared down into his mug of tea.

Stevie's mind remained on mute; the thrum of thoughts whirred beneath the silence, too blanketed to break through.

"After that, there was radio silence. The compound went into shutdown. I received a call saying that Mom hadn't shown up for her flight and that they didn't know where she was. They had no way of contacting her, and they couldn't tell me if she was alive or not. It wasn't until Mom turned up at the house three days later with President Dalton, or Director Dalton as he was back then, that I found out what had happened."

Her lips parted and then closed, her mouth dry. After a long silence, the only words that would stumble from the tip of her tongue were: "That's awful." They felt pathetic after what he had just told her, but given a dictionary and a hundred years, she didn't think she'd find any worthy enough.

"It was." Her father paused for a moment, and then sipped from his tea. When he returned the mug to the table, he held it loosely in the cradle of his hands. "When Mom got back, she was still in shock." He opened his mouth, but waited for a moment as though reconsidering what he was about to say. Then he turned to her. "I don't know if you remember, but she spent that first night in your room. I don't think she said a word to me, just went straight upstairs, and when I came up after speaking to Conrad, I found her lying in your bed."

Something tugged at the back of her mind—her mother stroking her hair, a wall of warmth pressed against her back, her parents' whispers through the shadows, her father dozing in the wicker chair near the door where her teddy bears normally sat—but it was so weak that her mind might have invented it, trying to fill the gap.

With her mug held close to her chest, she rubbed her thumbs along the brim, moving them apart and then bringing them back together again. She paused for a sip. The tea had lost some of its warmth, a touch too cool to be comforting. "Did Mom struggle after that?"

He met her eye. "You mean did she have PTSD?"

A blush threatened her cheeks as his bluntness called out her attempt at tact.

He shook his head and looked away again, towards the window once more. "No. Or at least nothing diagnosable." The hint of a frown eased across his brow, and his eyes fogged with thought. "Though looking back now, I wonder if there was something going on at some level, or if maybe that's what predisposed her to what happened after Iran. It's hard to say, and clearly I'm no expert." His lips tweaked into a bitter smile at that.

A moment or so of still silence later, he twisted to face her. His expression had sobered, and the pain in his eyes had returned. "I've thought a lot about what you said, about whether I should have seen how much she was struggling over this thing with Uncle Will, and I think maybe having seen her going through difficult things before, and having seen her pull through, it made me think that this would be the same." His gaze dipped to the table between them, and his frown deepened. "I know Mom seems happy a lot of the time, but she worries a lot and she gets down sometimes too. That's always been her." He gave a half-shrug. "I guess I thought this was the same, that she was grieving and feeling down—understandably—and I thought it would pass like it always does. I never thought it would get as bad as it did. If I had…"

It felt like he was trying to justify himself to her, or maybe to himself. A couple of weeks ago she would have leapt at the chance to blame him, to tell him that he should have listened to her when she came home and found her mother spaced out or to Russell when he was on edge about her mother's ability to cope from the very beginning. But somewhere along the line, that anger had worn itself out, like the temper tantrum it really was, and as Dalton had said, none of it really mattered anyway; what mattered was finding a way forward.

She gave him the tug of a smile. "To be fair, I never thought she'd get like this either."

His smile formed the ghost of her own. It said that he didn't necessarily believe her, even if it was true, but he appreciated the gesture nonetheless.

His gaze settled on his tea as he spoke. "I try and tell myself maybe it would have been easier if I didn't know her so well, maybe then I wouldn't have been clouded by past experience and I would have seen how much she was struggling. After all, it seems that everyone else did." He batted one hand towards the window, a vague gesture that summed up the rest of the world with a single flick. He returned to cradling the mug atop the table. The gold of his ring gleamed in the pale yellow light that seeped through from the kitchen. "Sometimes it feels like we're experts on the people we know the least." His shoulders tensed, and then slumped in a soundless sigh as he shook his head to himself. "But then again, maybe I'm just looking for an excuse as to why I missed it."

She watched him while the silence settled between them. He continued to stare out towards the window, the fog in his eyes breaking only as he took the occasional sip of tea. It struck her how human he was, riddled with his own fears and doubts and vulnerabilities. It was an odd feeling, like the moment when you realise that each and every stranger you pass is not just a bit part in the epic drama of your own life, but that they all possess an inner world just as rich and varied as your own, filled with thoughts and worries, perceptions, ambitions and idiosyncrasies, and according to the scripts of _their_ lives, it is you who is the bit part—no more than the blur of blonde hair and beige trench coat whom they happen to hold a door open for on their way to get their morning coffee, or the chatter in the background at the Italian restaurant as they attempt to impress their date, or the light in a house that they pass as they stroll along the street, alone once again. It turned the world into a network of threads, each as thick, unique and vital as the rest. Some crossing, some intertwining, some never destined to touch. It made her feel small, just a speck of the infinite. It made everyone else around her feel so much more complex.

"Is what happened in Iraq why Mom left the CIA?"

"It was part of it," her father said. "There were lots of small things and lots of not so small things that added up over time. Mitch dying was one of the not so small things."

"I always thought she left for ethical reasons."

"She did, but it was…complicated." His expression turned pained as he finished the sentence. It looked almost like a wince. He paused, and then took another long sip of tea.

She didn't know whether he intended to continue, or if that was his signal that he wasn't prepared to talk about it, but she got the sense that she should wait. She understood now why her mother claimed that in interrogations, silence was often the best approach.

After he returned the mug to the table, he shifted his chair around to face hers. Its feet scuffed against the floorboards. He laid his forearm along the tabletop, and his fingers drummed out a rhythm that jarred with the beat that drifted down the stairs. Then his fingers stilled, and he looked to her. The pain in his eyes had warped. "Mom was opposed to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. So much so that she wrote a report condemning it and calling for change. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly knowing your mother, it was well-received at the highest levels, if a little begrudgingly, and as a result she was offered a position in Baghdad where she'd be able to put the measures she'd suggested into place. But it meant her moving over there."

"To Iraq?"

He nodded, just once. Then he broke their gaze, and shook his head as he continued. "If she didn't take the job, she could have kept her role at Langley, but then nothing would have changed, and she didn't want to continue working there knowing that those methods were still being used and being unable to stop it. Plus, turning down a job offer, especially when people are depending on you, isn't great for your career prospects."

"So…why didn't she go?"

"She wanted to. She wanted to change the way the CIA operated, to make it more ethical and more effective. It would have meant being away from you three—" He gestured to her and then to the stairs. "—but to her it was worth it if she was making the world a safer place for you to grow up in. Her having seen the worst of humanity on a daily basis, I can understand that. I think maybe what happened to Mitch was part of it too. She wanted to stop the people responsible for his death and the deaths of thousands of others. It was a huge opportunity for her."

"Then why stay? Why quit?"

With the way his gaze trembled, it made it look as though he were forcing himself to meet her eye, and at the same time, it made her wish she hadn't asked.

When he spoke, his tone was matter-of-fact, but it only drew attention to the effort he put into concealing the emotion beneath it. "Because I told her that if she went to Baghdad, I'd no longer be able to support her. She had to choose: the job or us. She chose us. And as I said, she didn't feel she could keep working at the CIA after that, so she quit."

Something inside her sank, though she didn't know quite what she ought to feel about that, and it dragged her gaze away with it. She studied the tabletop for a moment or two, and then her gaze flicked back up to meet his. "Do you regret it?"

She expected the 'yes' to come without hesitation. That's what made sense to her after seeing how supportive her father had always been of her mother. He would confess that it was huge a mistake and that of course he regretted it, and that way he would still be the same 'Dad' as before, just a little more flawed, a little more human, her parents' relationship a little more complex.

But instead he took his time considering it.

"No. I don't." His eyes held a raw honesty; it hurt to look at more than the tug of pain had. "Though I do regret the way that I said it."

Her gut response was that she ought to feel indignant on behalf of her mother, angry that her father had ever used their family against her mother, angry that he had used their family to bend her mother's will, angry that he had taken away that opportunity for her mother to eliminate the use of torture. Her mother had stood up for what was right, but her father had refused to stand by her and he had forced her to take a seat. He had made her quit.

The burn of indignation didn't come though; instead, she was back to feeling lost and small, trying to make sense of the world with only one perspective. And she remembered waiting by the front door almost sixteen years ago to the day, watching each car that sailed past, telling herself this one would be it, this one would be her mother's, and that her father had been the one who had comforted her when it wasn't.

"Her plan was to be gone for a year at the most, though that figure kept creeping up. But the moment she told me about the offer, I knew that if she left, she wouldn't come back. She'd get so wrapped up in the job that it would've been just another year, and then just one more. And that's if we were lucky. So many agents went out there and never came back. I couldn't lose her. Even if by some miracle she was away for only a year, I couldn't be a single parent to three young kids. Being away from her for the past few weeks has been…" He trailed off. The look in his eyes said there was no word in the English language deep enough to capture how he felt. "And it's been bad enough trying to be a single parent to two adults and one almost-adult."

Her lips bunched to one side. "Jason will never be an adult."

He huffed. "Mom and I are aware." His smile lingered with that thought, and then softened and fled. "We both wanted what was best for our family, but we had different ideas of what that meant. She thought that going to Baghdad was the right thing to do. I thought it was best that she stayed here. I would have done everything in my power to make her stay. I would do it again. That doesn't mean that what I said was right, and it doesn't excuse it."

"But you did it because you loved her?"

"Yes." The word held infinite in the surrounding silence. There was no questioning it. "I wanted to keep her safe. For the three of you, for myself." He gave a lurching shrug, and on the tabletop, his hand rolled onto its side and then fell back to the wood. "Maybe that was selfish. But if that decision bought me even a minute longer with her, then I don't regret it."

Maybe it was selfish, but having had her mother be there for her, from her first period to her first heartbreak to the debrief after her first sexual experience (despite the mortifying digression into the pros of mutual masturbation: '_Never say that word again._', '_What? It's nothing to be embarrassed about. Your father and I—_', '_Oh my God, Mom!_'), she felt grateful for it.

He looked her in the eye as he spoke. There was something pleading about his expression; not pleading for her to agree with him, but pleading for her to see his perspective. "I don't want you to think that what I said to her came out of nowhere. It wasn't just about the job offer in Baghdad. As I said, over time lots of small things and lots of not so small things added up. I saw how wrapped up in cases she became; sometimes she'd come home but her eyes would be blank and it was obvious that her mind was still at Langley, other nights she wouldn't notice how late it was and she'd forget to come home altogether and end up crashing on a couch at the office. All the time she was pushing boundaries; it made her great at her job, but it also meant that she endangered herself. I mean, despite having a 'desk job', she wouldn't hesitate to drop everything and fly halfway across the world into the middle of a war zone or a terrorist hotbed. What's worse, she loved it. Meanwhile, I would be sat at home worrying about her every minute that she was gone, waiting for that call saying that something had happened and she wasn't coming back. And I saw how much her leaving each time affected the three of you and how much happier and more settled you were when she was present. When Mitch died…when I came that close to having to tell the three of you that she was dead…when she went straight back to work as though nothing had happened and nothing would ever happen again… I could put up with it for a while once things had settled down, but when she said she was planning to move to Iraq, that was it. I couldn't pretend like I was okay with it."

"So you told her the truth?"

"Yes." His gaze bored into her. His eyes glistened behind the light-tinted lenses of his glasses, and she got the sense that despite what he said, he remained conflicted. "And I wish I'd found a different way of saying it, but I don't regret it."

She clutched her mug to her chest, seeking a warmth that had already dissipated. "What would you have done if she had gone to Baghdad?"

Perhaps it didn't matter, given that wasn't the path that they had taken and it didn't benefit her in any way to know how things might have been different, but maybe part of her was looking for him to soften the bluntness of 'us or Baghdad', to say that it had been a bluff or something thrown out in the heat of the moment. Then again, she might respect him less if he did. Telling a harsh truth was one thing, but manipulating someone was entirely different.

For second, she regretted asking it.

His lips tugged at one side. It drew attention to the absence of a smile. "It's as I said: for a relationship to work, you have to trust in each other and trust in the future. If that trust's broken, I don't know how you're meant to keep going."

At some point, the music upstairs had cut out. The silence felt thicker for it.

Though nothing had changed over the course of the conversation—everything they'd discussed was consigned to the past, a tangle of once-happeneds and what-ifs—she felt different, about her parents and about their relationship. At first it felt like a loss, like the image she held of their fairytale relationship had been shattered into a million pieces, and no matter how hard she tried to scramble them back together, the cracks persisted. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw that the fairytale had only ever been an image; something that perhaps she herself had constructed, or maybe they had shielded her with. The truth was: they were an epic. At eight years old she couldn't have appreciated it; she wanted princes and princesses and happily-ever-after. But at the cusp of twenty-four, she could see that perhaps all the ups and downs, the 'working at making it work' was what gave their relationship true meaning. Each struggle deepened it. Each test proved it. The fact that they were still together today and that they were still committed to one another showed that their love was wonderfully complicated. A story of substance. Something that she could be grateful for, now knowing that she shouldn't ever have taken it for granted.

"Tomorrow isn't just your birthday—"

At her father's voice, her gaze snapped back into focus.

He had leant back in his chair, and was watching her; one hand still lay against the table, the other on the armrest. It looked as though he'd been considering what he was about to say, and was still debating how and whether to say it. "—it's Mitch's son's birthday too. He'll be sixteen, and he never got to meet his dad. In the end, it all came down to one decision: Mom stayed and she came back, Mitch left and he didn't."

He paused, and let the weight of the words sink in.

Out there somewhere, there was a stranger, his life both connected and tangential to her own, as though without ever meeting, their threads had formed a single knot before they veered away on their separate paths; only by luck, or fate or some other inexplicable force, was she blessed with the path that saw her mother survive, where his father had not.

"I hope I haven't upset you or scared you by telling you what happened in Iraq, that certainly wasn't my intention, but I want you to know how precious life is. When you're young, you feel invincible, like life is a given. But with time, you learn—usually the hard way—how fragile it really is. I know that what's happened with Mom recently has been difficult, and I get that it's been a struggle for you, for all of us, and that maybe it's been easier for you to push her away because it feels like maybe then it'll hurt less. But I don't want you to make that mistake. Because one day you will regret it." His gaze drifted to where his hand rested against the tabletop, his fingers plucking and fumbling over nothing. Sorrow tinged his eyes. He shook his head to himself, as though to distract himself from the thought. "I've lost both of my parents now. I was fortunate enough to know them as long as I did, especially knowing what happened to Mom and Uncle Will. But the one thing I'll always regret is not taking the time to get to know them better while I had the chance, because once they're gone, that's it." He gave a stilted shrug. "You can't go back and spend more time with them, you can't ask them how they knew when they were first in love, what their oldest memory is, what the most poignant thing anyone ever said to them is… Part of being a parent is wanting to give your children more opportunities than you had, another part is wanting to shield them from having the same regrets."

"Does it bother Mom when I don't spend much time with her?"

His gaze flicked up to meet hers. "Honestly?" He paused. "Yes."

It shouldn't have stung, but it did.

"But she gets it, we both do." He flapped it aside, and his brow crinkled. "You're young, you want to be with your friends, you have your own life, you're dating your mother's doctor…"

She met him with a pointed stare. _That was totally uncalled for_.

He smiled.

A moment later, his expression sobered again. He leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows atop his thighs, his hands folded in the gap in front of his knees. "I think one of the biggest things I've learnt from your mother and what happened to her and Uncle Will with their parents is that we don't grieve for the past we've lost, we grieve for the future we never got to see. The birthdays our loved ones missed, the successes and joys we couldn't share with them, the conversations we never got to have. Unfortunately, nothing can protect you from grief—it's part of life—but all Mom and I want for you, for all of you, is that one day when you look back, you'll know that you made the most of every moment with the people you love, because then, rather than having regrets for all the things you never said or did, you'll have all these memories instead and you'll be able to find comfort in them."

Her gaze drifted back to the photograph of her mother and Uncle Will that was propped on the cluttered white shelves behind her father. This time though, rather than the image, she saw the person who had taken it, the person who had once held that slip of paper, a person she had never met but whose trace lingered on in the items, memories and grief they'd left behind. She didn't even know whether it was her grandmother or grandfather who had taken the photograph; she hadn't ever asked her mother. And had her mother died in Iraq or Iran or October, she wouldn't have gotten the chance. What memories or regrets would she have then? She couldn't remember the days before Iraq or Iran, but she remembered the morning of the poisoning, when her mother had asked her once again whether she wanted to spend time together that weekend, and once again she had said she was too busy, but maybe another day. Her mother still felt like a stranger to her in some senses, though no longer in a way that distanced them, but instead in a way that made her want to get to know her better, to ask the questions that she hadn't asked. Fortunately, she still had that chance.

She looked to her father. "So, I need to make the most of you while you're both still around?"

He gave her a smile; though taut, it was blessed with warmth. "That's my two cents."

He held her gaze for a moment, and then pushed himself up from the chair, lifted his mug from the table, along with the cell phone, and padded through to the kitchen.

She twisted around in her seat to follow him. "What happened to Mitch's son?"

"I don't know." He tossed the dregs of the tea into the sink, flipped the faucet on and rinsed the mug out. The splurge and splash of water filled the room. He raised his voice over it. "Mom wanted to keep in touch, but it was…" His hands stilled for a moment as he sought an answer from his reflection in the blackened window behind the sink. The water continued to gush down. Then he shrugged, and returned to rinsing the mug out. "…complicated."

He flipped the faucet off, clinked the mug down on the metal dish rack, and then grabbed the green gingham tea towel wedged in the handle of the dishwasher, and dried his hands.

She propped her elbow against the top rail of the chair, careful not to knock her funny bone (_Not a bone, but the ulnar nerve_, Jon had told her and had traced its path with one fingertip), and she rested her chin to her fist. "Complicated… Because Mom came back and Mitch didn't?"

"Something like that." He tucked the tea towel over the rail at the end of the kitchen island, next to its twin, and then perched on the wooden stool and set his cell phone down with a clatter on the countertop behind him. "After Mitch died, his wife decided to move away and she broke off all contact. That hurt your mother, but she understood. And I think it was probably for the best. For everyone."

She studied her father. There was a strain beneath his expression that told her she'd be wise not to ask anymore about that, which in turn only sharpened her interest.

She let it go, though. But she couldn't shake the thought that out there somewhere there was a boy who was anticipating his birthday just as she did hers, only whilst her whole body held the ache of disappointment that came with knowing her mother wouldn't be there to celebrate with her this year, he had never known the joy of having his father with him to celebrate his. A pang of guilt rippled through her chest for ever taking that for granted. She owed it to him to learn from it.

"You said you've seen Mom struggle with lots of things before… Do you know what led Dalton to giving her a box of ginger biscuits?"

He chuckled, the sound breathless, and he glanced down at his feet before he met her gaze. The lightness of that laugh still danced in his eyes; it felt good to see after weeks of pain. "That's a story she'll tell you herself one day. When you're ready for it."

He tilted his head towards the stairs. "Not that I'm trying to parent the adult or anything, but it might be a good idea to head up. Wouldn't want you sleeping late and giving Russell an excuse to fire you on your birthday."

She conceded that with a groan.

After a moment or so of willing herself to move, she hauled herself up from the seat. Without thinking, she ambled over and wrapped her arms around her father in a hug, and then realised she couldn't remember the last time that she had. It seemed to surprise him too, or at least that's what his hesitation in returning the embrace said.

She clung to him for a moment. It felt like the way she saw him had shifted too, just like her understanding of her parents' relationship. The aura of 'Dad' had slipped and revealed him to be less assured, less virtuous, less perfect, and her appreciation of him deepened all the more for it. She thought about saying she was glad that her mother hadn't gone to Baghdad, even if he regretted the way he had trapped her into her decision to quit; or that she was glad that he and her mother had worked at making it work, even if they made love look it should be easy, like there was nothing to it; or that she was glad that he had told her the truth about Iraq, even if she knew how much another family had suffered for it. But she stepped out of the embrace and settled for a taut smile along with a—"Love you, pop."—instead.

The complex rendered sweet and uncomplicated.

* * *

**Henry**

**1994**

"…and you've got your own crib and lots of toys to play with…" Henry kept his voice smooth and low, barely more than a murmur, whilst he stared transfixed at the baby girl swaddled in Elizabeth's marl blue t-shirt and nestled in the cradle of his arms. His cheeks ached, but he couldn't stop himself from smiling. She was perfect. No— She was more than perfect. He couldn't understand why the whole hospital hadn't flocked to marvel at just how perfect she was.

The darkness outside pressed in through the gaps between the grey slats of the vertical blinds, whilst the fluorescent panels set into the ceiling simmered and steeped the room in their cool-white glow. The blackened glass formed a mirror, its illusion broken only when a gust blew a flurry of snow against the window and the clumps dragged down the opposite side to fatten the bank that hugged the stone ledge at the bottom. A slight chill ruffled inside each time and provided a puff of relief from the stagnant heat of the delivery room. Henry meandered back and forth, his reflection following out of the corner of his eye, whilst he held the baby girl close and told her all about their home and their family and how much everyone was looking forward to meeting her.

Then, without warning, her eyes bunched shut even tighter, and her nose wriggled, and slowly, she peeled open one eyelid.

He stopped. _God_. How many times had he seen that exact same look when Elizabeth stirred on a Sunday morning? His breath stilled, and if it were possible, his smile widened.

"Hey there, baby girl." He lowered himself onto the thick-cushioned seat of the chair in the corner of the room, whilst the baby's other eye eased open. He tilted his arms so that the baby girl could see Elizabeth where she dozed in the bed in the middle of the room, her hair still sweat-straggled and clinging to her forehead, her pale blue hospital gown and the starched white sheets draped over her. "You see that woman there? That's your mommy." He watched Elizabeth for a moment, and that swell of love bubbled up again until hot tears pricked his eyes. "She's the most beautiful woman in the whole world." He lowered the baby girl, and stared down into her eyes. A blue as perfect as her mother's. "But she worries about a lot of things, and she's new to all this, so just go easy on her, okay?"

He brushed his fingertips over the baby's dusting of blonde hair and then loosened the folds of the t-shirt as the baby tried to wrestle her fist free. When her flailing hand caught hold of his finger and clung tight—so tight that the world stopped—everything inside him froze and then melted again, and he was hit by the urge to protect her. He swallowed back the thickness in his throat and settled into that patter once more. He told her all about the street where they lived and their little patch of garden and the room that would one day be hers; meanwhile, each thud of his heart came with the echo of, '_She's holding my finger. She's actually here, and she's holding my finger._'

He didn't know whether minutes or hours had passed when Elizabeth rolled her head to the side and cracked open one eye. "Are you conspiring with our daughter?"

He grinned up at her. _Our daughter_. "Just reading her in on all the intel."

She grinned back at him, and then nodded vaguely in his direction. "How's the hand?"

"I'll survive." The hand that supported their baby girl still throbbed like it had been crushed beneath a sledgehammer, and he wasn't entirely convinced that he wouldn't be paying orthopaedics a visit on their way out. It didn't matter, though. And Elizabeth would never let him live it down if he made a fuss. "How are you feeling?"

She pressed her fists into the mattress on either side of her and strained to ease herself further up the reclined back of the bed. "Like childbirth's for wusses."

No sooner had she said it than she slumped back against the pillows with a huff of exhaustion, and her eyes slipped shut again.

Her breathing returned to the same steady rhythm as before, a song he would never tire of hearing, whilst the muffled clatter of footsteps, the lilt of nurses' chatter and the trundle of hospital beds drifted through from the hallway. It made their pocket of silence all the more precious.

Just when he thought she had succumbed to sleep once more, she blinked open her eyes, stared dazed at the ceiling, and then lolled her head to face him. Her gaze drifted to the bundle in his arms, and lingered there for a second before it flicked up to meet his. She cracked a smile, but a shadow of tentativeness lurked beneath it. "So…did I do good?"

He stared at her. His mouth hinged open. He looked down at the baby girl who squirmed in his arms and who watched him with blue-eyed wonder, and then back up at Elizabeth. He swallowed, his mouth dry. "Elizabeth…I…"

He wanted to say that he loved her, but that would have been an insult to the depth of what he was feeling. The word love was a raindrop, it was a grain of rock, it was a speck of light. What surged inside him now was Victoria Falls, it was Mount Everest, it was aurora borealis. He wanted to surround himself in her and engulf her in him.

Her smile softened, the shadow replaced with warmth. "I'm going to take speechlessness from the man who has a quote for everything as a 'yes'. And try to remember, no matter what you're feeling right now, my brain is literally swimming in a vat of hormones."

He chuckled, though tears blurred his eyes. "You did perfect."

She held his gaze, her smile lingering. The look tethered them as silence spun out between them. He hoped that in that lull she heard the words that he couldn't find, let alone voice, and felt that rush of love so immense that he couldn't capture, let alone express.

But as the seconds wore on, her smile thinned and dimmed, the tentativeness returning. Then her gaze flitted to their baby girl, who still gripped his finger. "Can I…?"

He paused for a moment, stunned.

Then— "Of course."

He scrambled up from the seat, the movement a little awkward with their daughter cradled in the crook of his arm. He perched on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath him, and he waited for Elizabeth to peel down the hospital gown that had been draped over her, revealing the swell of her breasts. When she held her arms out in a sling in preparation, he attempted a sideways pass to transfer their baby girl over, hindered by the hand still wrapped around his finger, and as he did, he prayed to God that their daughter had been paying attention when he told her to go easy on her mother.

When she was delivered and first scooped onto Elizabeth's chest, the baby girl had turned her nose up and shoved herself away from the breast, the fullness of that soft flesh clawed and dented by tiny scrabbling fingers, and though he and the midwife had tried to reassure Elizabeth and though Elizabeth had insisted that she was okay and of course she didn't mind, failure stained her eyes when she'd been forced to express golden drops of colostrum into a plastic syringe and dribble it onto their baby girl's lips. There was something so mechanical and detached about it, and he couldn't bear for her to face that rejection again.

This time, their baby girl snuggled up to Elizabeth, and when Henry prised his finger free, she batted and grabbed at Elizabeth's chest instead. Henry eased the t-shirt out from around their daughter, so that she and Elizabeth would be skin to skin, and then he draped it over them so that the baby girl's head peeked out from beneath.

He settled back against the bed and slung his arm around Elizabeth's bare shoulders. His fingertips traced lines up and down her arm; all the while, he tried to maintain an air of calm as the baby girl rooted but refused to latch on.

Whilst the frown on Elizabeth's brow grew heavier and heavier and the tension seeped into her shoulders, he began to mentally rehearse all the reasons why formula did not equal failure. Not that he thought Elizabeth would listen, let alone believe him.

"Why won't she just—" Elizabeth stopped.

Silence.

His breath tightened in his chest.

Then a rushed whisper—"Henry, Henry, look." She turned her head and beamed at him. Excitement danced in her eyes. The look lasted less than half a second before she returned to their daughter and stroked the baby girl's cheek as she began sucking. "I think it's working."

Henry smiled to himself and nuzzled the crook of her shoulder, his words muffled as he pressed his lips to her skin. "See, you're a natural." Inside, he breathed a silent sigh of relief.

"I wouldn't go that far. It's only hour—what? Five? Six?"

"One hour at a time, babe."

She gave a huff of a laugh and relaxed against him.

They settled into a comfortable silence. The only sound came from the whistle of wind through the window along with the hush of the snow and the occasional swallow as their daughter continued to suck at the breast, her eyes open, her gaze drifting back and forth between her parents as they both stared down at her in awe. Henry continued to run his fingers up and down the curve of Elizabeth's arm, but as he pressed kisses to her shoulder, he noticed that the tension had started to creep back in, as though fibre by fibre her muscles were twisting taut.

"Babe?"

Elizabeth swallowed, the sound thick in her throat. She kept her face turned towards their daughter, but he caught sight of the tear tumble down from her jaw and splash against the tee. It stained the marl blue cotton.

His fingers stilled against her arm. "What is it?"

"Nothing. Just stupid hormones." She freed one hand from beneath their baby girl and swiped at her eyes with the knuckle of her forefinger. But for each tear that she brushed aside, two more snuck through, blazed down her cheek and spilled onto the t-shirt.

"Tell me." He stroked her hair back and tucked it behind her ear.

When she said nothing, he asked, "Does it hurt? Are upset about earlier?"

She shook her head. Her hair swept forward again and curtained her face, whilst the teardrops tumbled in a scattered arc. Her voice hitched as she tried to suppress a sob. "I'm just… I'm worried that one day she'll grow up and think that I didn't want her."

"What?" He frowned. "Of course she won't think that."

"But I have struggled."

"You have, and that's understandable. It's a huge thing for anyone to become a parent, but to become a mother after losing your mother—"

"Eleven years ago." She gave a self-derisive laugh, then snubbed her nose with the back of her hand and drew in a shaky breath that told him she was fighting to compose herself and stop any more tears from flowing.

"Any years ago. Of course you're going to find it difficult. And that doesn't mean that you didn't want her." He eased off the edge of the bed, and then swivelled around so that when he perched on the mattress once more, he was facing her. He rested his hand against her thigh—still buried beneath the starched sheets and the pale green cellular blanket—whilst she cradled their daughter to her chest and stared down at her. The gaze looked forced, as though she couldn't bear to meet their daughter's eye but couldn't bear to meet his either. "You know what I think?"

"That PMS is starting to look a breeze right about now?"

He smiled, and hoped that some of its warmth would reach her, even if she wouldn't, or couldn't, look up at him. "I think that one day, when she's all grown up and she's married and she's about to have a baby of her own, it's going to hit her that she's going to be a mother. And when it does, she's going to freak out, because that's what normal people do… Plus she's half-Adams, so honestly, babe, she really doesn't stand a chance—" He squeezed her thigh and received the barest flicker of a smile in return. "And when she freaks out, she's going to turn to you. And when you tell her how you struggled and how you got through it and how everything she's feeling is totally normal, she won't think that you didn't want her; she'll understand, and she'll be grateful that you were able to share that experience with her, and the fact that you got through it will be a comfort to her, and it'll give her the confidence to know that she'll get there one day too."

Elizabeth swirled her fingertips over the fine blonde strands of their baby girl's hair. She stayed silent for a while, and the fact that she didn't immediately refute him and that—for now at least—the tears had stopped, made him think maybe his take on it had helped.

But then she looked up at him, and her eyes brimmed with the tears that hadn't fallen. Overflowing puddles of blue. "What if she doesn't?"

He squeezed her thigh again, the touch firmer and lingering. "I promise you, she will."

She shook her head. The tears spilled down. "What if she doesn't have me there to tell her?"

He opened his mouth, but stopped when he found there were no words there. His tongue desolate. He had thought she meant, 'What if she doesn't understand?', not 'What if I die before then?'.

His mind railed against the thought. It couldn't happen, it wouldn't happen, he wouldn't let it happen. Everything inside him screamed to protect her—no longer just his wife, but the mother of his child. He wanted to tell her that of course she would be there to tell their daughter, of course nothing bad would ever happen to either of them. But how could he promise her that after everything she had been through with her parents? Before the crash took them away from her, she had never once thought that she might lose them, she had never once thought that one day she would become a mother without having her own mother to turn to, she had never once thought that she would find herself holding her baby daughter in her arms and knowing that her parents would never get meet her—their first grandchild.

So he mustered a smile instead. It tasted grim. "Then, when the time's right, I'll tell her." Before she could counter that with the inevitable follow-up question, his grip on her thigh tightened again. "And we'll make sure that she's surrounded by our family and friends, so I promise you, no matter what happens, she'll never be alone."

She paused. Then gave a nod. The words came breathless. "Thank you."

When she tipped her chin at him, beckoning him, he eased closer, and mindful of their baby girl—who still stared up at them with wide eyes, at once so aware and so oblivious—he leant in, threaded his fingers through her hair, and captured her lips in a sweet kiss.

When they parted, he pressed his forehead to hers, his eyes still shut, and he nuzzled her nose. "Thank you." He pecked at her lips, one corner—"Thank you."—and then the other corner—"Thank you."—and then he drew her in for another lingering kiss.

It was only when a tiny flailing arm beat his chest and he was met by an unimpressed glare from their baby girl, that he chuckled and drew back properly.

Elizabeth readjusted the t-shirt before it could slip down, whilst their baby girl returned to clawing and kneading at the breast. "Looks like someone's going to have to learn to share." She stroked the baby's cheek with the back of her finger.

"She's only a baby."

She shot him a look, her eyebrows raised. "What makes you think I was talking about our daughter?" A dangerous smile glimmered at the corners of her lips.

He laughed. Then—_Our daughter_—and that goofy smile returned again. He placed his hand on her knee through the wadding of the sheets and cellulose blanket. "So…have you decided?"

"See, now I'm leaning more towards Stephanie."

He considered that for a moment. Then gave mouth shrug along with a nod. "Solid choice."

"You'd say that no matter what I said."

"No, I like it. Stephanie McCord." He brushed his fingertips over the strands of downy blonde hair that covered their baby girl's head. _Stephanie McCord_. "She'll be 'Steph' for short."

"No."

His fingers stilled. "No what?" He stared at Elizabeth, whilst a simmer of exasperation threatened to break through. "Babe, we've been through the book at least ten times—"

She rolled her eyes at him. "No, not _Steph_. Stevie."

"_Stevie_?" His brow gathered in a frown. _Why Stevie?_

There was a long pause whilst the cogs of his mind clunked far too slow.

Then it dawned on him, and the frown deepened. "As in Stevie Nicks?"

Elizabeth flashed him a smile. "She'll be the coolest kid in preschool."

Elizabeth looked so pleased with herself as she smiled down at their daughter and stroked her cheek that he couldn't argue with that. His frown eased away, and he gave a shrug. "Stevie it is."

He watched the pair of them for a while. The soft sounds of Stevie swallowing filled the room, and her ears wiggled as she nursed. Elizabeth smiled and stared at their baby girl, occasionally murmuring a few words of encouragement or just a, '_Hey there_', utterly enthralled.

The longer he watched the two of them together, the more it felt as though he had faded into the background, as though the rest of the world—himself included—had become invisible to Elizabeth. The simple contentment that had warmed him before now ebbed. It left him feeling insignificant and detached, excluded from their bubble of two. A bitter ache strummed through his chest, but it pained him the second that it did. Their roles were shifting again, and he needed to step up, to put his own ego aside so that he could support them both. He was someone's dad. There was no space for ego in that.

He cleared his throat, squeezed Elizabeth's knee and eased off the side of the mattress. "I'm going to go call Will and Conrad, let them know." He would phone his mother first, of course, and tell her she was now officially a grandma, but it felt cruel to say that. "Do you want me to get you anything? Something to eat or drink?"

He grabbed the khaki bomber jacket that he'd slung over the foam-cushioned back of the armchair in the corner of the room. With his back to Elizabeth, he patted the jacket down for his wallet and then draped it over his forearm just below the crook of his elbow. The hospital air was as thick and stagnant as lukewarm pea soup, and the thought of a breath of that bitter cold air outside burning through his lungs called to him. It might help clear his head too.

"Henry. Don't."

At Elizabeth's voice, he twisted around to face her.

She stared up at him from the bed whilst Stevie's fingers opened and closed over a handful of her soft flesh. "Not yet." She stretched her hand out to him. Her fingers opened and closed over the air. "I want it to be just the three of us for a while."

He paused whilst all thought fled him. It left his mind as silent as the snow that swooned through the night beyond the blackened window. He blinked. "Sure. Of course." He folded up the jacket and ditched it on the cushioned seat of the armchair. "What do you need?"

"Just sit with us." She touched her hand to the rumpled sheets that covered the patch of mattress next to her, and waited for him to join them.

When he'd toed off his trainers, eased onto the bed and swung his legs up next to hers, his arm settling around her shoulders once more, she nestled into him, and then turned her chin to look up at him. "I liked listening to you talking to her earlier. I want to hear what happens next."

And so he began that meandering murmur again. He told them about how they'd spend their first Christmas together and all the places they'd visit when Stevie was older and about the play park around the corner where they'd spend every Sunday afternoon—anything and everything that wandered into his mind, from the next few weeks to the distant future. All the while he stroked his fingertips up and down Elizabeth's bare arm, he breathed in the scent of her that mingled with that heady newborn smell, and he welcomed her gentle warmth, which felt so vital compared to the dry heat that hung in the room.

When Stevie finished feeding, Elizabeth shifted her around so that she lay along the length of her breastbone, the t-shirt tucked around her, her head snuggled just below the base of Elizabeth's throat. Henry continued to talk and talk and talk until their breathing slowed and shallowed. He only stopped when he felt certain that they were both asleep.

A moment later, Elizabeth's lips stretched into a sleepy smile. "So, four kids, huh?" Her voice mumbled as she referred to the siblings he'd promised Stevie. "You sure your hand can take it?"

He chuckled. "I'll buy you a stress ball."

She turned to him and cracked open one eye. There was something dangerous and goading about her look. "You sure you don't want to go for five, seeing as how you're trying to out-virile your father and all?"

"I'm not trying to out-virile—" He huffed. But Elizabeth's smile only stretched wider. God, she loved how riled he got with her teasing. She was like a tabby cat toying with a mouse. "Four is a nice balanced number, that's all. Four Beatles. Four Gospels. Four—"

"Horsemen of the Apocalypse?" She arched an eyebrow at him. It told him he had well and truly dug himself into a hole. She gave a little snort of a laugh, and then turned away again and closed her eyes. The smile remained, though, and she patted his thigh. "Don't think I haven't noticed your I've-been-fruitful-and-multiplied swagger, Henry McCord."

He opened his mouth to protest that, but then his lips tensed. _Okay… Not entirely untrue. But still… _"Shouldn't you be sleeping?"

There was something inherently wrong about the fact that she could run rings around him despite being sleep-deprived, exhausted from childbirth, and fogged-out on hormones.

Or maybe that's what made her so right. His opposite, his equal, his match.

"Sleep sounds good." She patted his thigh again, the touch so weak it barely registered through his jeans, and then she brought her hand to rest with the other one against Stevie's back. Her chest swelled and then fell with a sigh. "I love you."

He thought he had loved her before, but now he had witnessed the mist rising off Victoria Falls and felt its roar surge through his veins; he had scaled to the peak of Mount Everest, looked down upon the world and had his breath taken away; he had watched the neon green fires of aurora borealis swarm the star-speckled sky and felt them ignite his heart, his soul, his mind. He still didn't have the words to capture the depth of what he felt for her, and perhaps he never would, but he knew that he wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life showing her and thanking her for taking the boy that he had been and turning him into a man, a husband, a dad.

He kissed her temple, and then brushed his lips against the curve of her ear. "I. Love. You."

When Elizabeth had succumbed to sleep—properly this time—Stevie wriggled her head around and then slumped it down so that her cheek was pressed to Elizabeth's chest, her tiny fists bunched on either side of her head. She peered up at him with one half-open, all-blue eye.

He smiled down at her, his cheeks aching with pride again, and he brushed his fingertips over that soft-soft hair. "Thank you for going easy on her. You know, I think you and I are going to make a pretty good team. We'll need to if we're going to keep up with her."

His gaze turned to Elizabeth. She looked so peaceful, so content, as though sleep could wash away all sorrows, even a lifetime's worth of grief. His smile dimmed and his fingers stilled, whilst the ache in his heart leaked out. _What if she doesn't?_

His gaze drifted back to Stevie. So new, so pristine, so perfect. No— More than perfect. So perfect that he wished he could preserve her in that moment, with her belly full, her body snuggled in her mother's warmth, her mind unable to comprehend the concept of death, let alone the death of the woman who had carried her for nine months and who had nursed her at her breast.

The words spilled from his lips. "I hope you never truly understand."

The room held as still and silent as the ever-thickening blanket of snow outside.

He steeled himself with a deep breath. It trembled through his lungs, and he let it whistle out again. _God, these hormones are catching_. Then he started stroking Stevie's hair once more and he smiled down at their daughter, though the thought still quivered at the corners of his lips. "Right. Now, I know it's not a concern yet, but your mother's not a great cook. If it comes from a packet, you should be all right, but anything else, it's probably safer that you ask me instead…"

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**Thank you for reading! **

**Thoughts are appreciated. More tomorrow?**


	75. Chapter Seventy-Three: oblivious

**Note**: Long chapter ahead. Please let me know once you reach the end and are ready for more. : )

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**Chapter Seventy-Three**

**…****oblivious**

**Elizabeth**

**2005**

Upstairs, the kids were fast asleep. When Elizabeth left Henry, he had been too.

The kitchen lights leaked out a cold yellow glow that diffused through the room. It was just bright enough to draw contrast to the blackness outside and cast shadows inside, and it lured both closer somehow, so that as Elizabeth sat at the table, her hands wrapped around a tepid mug of tea so weak that it looked more like malted milk, she felt surrounded by the night, enveloped in her own pocket of alone. The smell of the cheese and tomato pizzas they had eaten for dinner still stained the air, though the once sweet scent of garlic had now turned acrid, and it tingled in her nose. Everything felt a little like that at the moment: bitter.

Teaching wasn't as bad as she had thought it would be, but after the CIA, it felt like the mental equivalent of trading in a Lamborghini Gallardo for a Ford Escort. The faculty were nice enough, she supposed, but their pleasant conversations about holidays and the weather and why on earth students felt the need to streak the Lawn were nothing compared to the spars she'd had with Isobel, Juliet or George. (And, apparently, the fact that she had once been one of those Wahoos was _not_ the proper response…) (It had intrigued Henry though.) Everything in the house now had a designated place: the spot at the left-hand edge of the footstool for the television remote, the drawer of 'might-just-be-useful-one-day-so-can't-possibly-risk-throwing-it-away' junk, the tower of books she'd probably never get around to reading yet had to sit on her bedside table rather than on the shelf. Everyone was settled: the horses, Henry, the kids.

But it still didn't feel like home.

And a not insignificant part of her feared that, despite what she had told Stevie, maybe it never would.

She couldn't say that though, not without risking another argument. Baghdad Station Part Two, or Three, or Five, or Seven… She'd lost count. So she put on a happy face instead and pushed through. And she tried her best to ignore the fact that doing so left her feeling isolated and invisible, like she was trapped in a box of one-way glass, both surrounded by and sequestered from the happiness in the outside world. The only way she could escape that feeling was to be truly alone. Hence why, once again, she found herself sat in a semi-darkened kitchen, brooding over a brew, rather than putting on her best pretence of sleep whilst Henry clung to her in what appeared to be a bout of some kind of parasomnia triggered by the fear that at any moment she might change her mind about Baghdad, pack her bag, and go.

Footsteps stumbled down the stairs. During the day, the scuff might not have been noticeable, drowned out by the whinnies of the horses and the whines of the kids, but in the midnight hush, each noise took on a new gravity. It caused the back of Elizabeth's neck to tense, and her finger stilled where it had been nudging her wedding ring around and around behind the mug.

"There you are." Henry's voice came from the doorway. It was claggy with sleep. He paused for a moment beneath the arched entranceway into the kitchen, and pressed the heel of his palm to one eye and then the other, and then blinked hard. Startled.

Elizabeth raised the mug and took a sip of tea—no more than a few drops passed her lips—and then she clunked the mug back down. She continued to stare out of the window behind the sink. The darkness outside was so thick that it felt as though it pressed up against the glass, and were that glass to crack, a swarm of black would tumble in.

"Couldn't sleep?" Henry's bare feet padded against the floorboards as he came to stand behind her chair. He smoothed his hands over her shoulders, midway down her upper arms and back again, and something akin to an electrostatic prickle jarred up her neck as he leant in to kiss the top of her head.

He stopped.

Her shoulders had tensed beneath his touch, and remained tense even now. And she _might_ have ducked away when she sensed him leaning in...

"Do we need to talk?" A heavy frown weighed down his tone.

She tried to force her shoulders to relax. They just tensed in a different way instead.

He let go of her, pulled out the chair at the end of the table with a sharp screech of the feet across the floor, and sank down. She'd been right about the frown, though it was even heavier than she'd imagined. His eyes bore the weight of it too, whilst his gaze bored into her.

Her fingers flexed around the mug and she stared down into the milky depths. "I'm fine."

"Because you seem a little…" His shoulders rose with a shimmy that seemed to say '…_off_'.

"Just tired."

"Really?" He arched his eyebrows at her in a way that prefixed that with an '_Oh_'.

Silence. The strands of it thickened with each second that dragged on.

He rubbed his face, somehow managed to rub the furrow in his brow deeper, and then shook his head to himself whilst he looked up to the ceiling, perhaps muttering a prayer to God. If he was praying, it might have been a prayer to help him hold his tongue, because it looked as though he was straining to stop himself from saying something he knew that he shouldn't.

But the prayer can't have worked, or maybe he just didn't care anymore. His hands curled into fists atop the table. There was a strain in his voice too. "Because you've barely spoken to me the past few weeks, unless it's about childcare or what groceries we need, you've been spending every free moment alone with the horses, you tense up any time I'm anywhere near you, and sex feels like you're enacting some kind of penance that you've forced upon yourself. That is, if it happens at all."

_So that was his problem?_

Her chin dipped. She kept her gaze on the spot of table just in front of the mug. "Well, I'm sorry if I'm not vocal enough for you, in the bedroom or otherwise—"

He huffed, something between derision and disbelief, and arched back in his chair.

Her gaze darted up and sharpened on him. "—but calling me frigid's not going to help."

He shook his head to himself again. "I'm not calling you—" He cut off and took a deep breath instead. He stooped forward in the seat. The shift in position forced him to look up to meet her gaze, and the widened whites of his eyes shone. "If you're not happy here…if you can't be happy here, or if being here is too much for you, and you want to go back—"

"Back to what?"

The sharpness of her words cut straight through the room. Silence flooded in, and with a whine, it rang out.

_Back to what?_ She'd turned down the job for him. She'd quit the CIA for him. She'd given up the place and people who, for fifteen years, had been her home for him. She couldn't just waltz back in now. And they couldn't go around this argument again.

"I've told you before, Henry, it's not your job—"

"To make you happy. I know." He fixed that with a firm stare—_Believe me, I know_. "But you also said that all you needed was for me to hold your hand when you're not. But right now you won't even let me do that. And I don't know how I'm meant to help you."

"That's because you can't help me," she muttered. She braced her hands against the table and pushed herself up to standing. His gaze sizzled against the nape of her neck as she ambled past him and towards the sink, the milk-warm mug wrapped in one hand.

"I know that leaving the CIA and moving here has been hard on you—"

She resisted a snort, and half hoped, half couldn't care less if he caught the reflection of her wry smile in the blackened window. "It would have been nice if it was my own decision, that's all."

"I didn't force you."

"No, but you made it _brutally_ clear what the consequences would be if I didn't do exactly what _you_ wanted me to." The tea splashed against the bottom of the sink, followed by the slam of the mug against the countertop. She clutched the side until her knuckles whitened, whilst her shoulders hunched towards her ears. Though the granite pressed cool against her palms, it was about as effective as an ice cube to a house fire. The glare of her reflection simmered back at her.

Henry's voice softened. "If you chose us because you thought it was the right thing to do, rather than what you wanted to do, then I don't know if that's good enough."

_What I wanted was never to have been put in the position in the first place. What I wanted was for you to support me rather than using our marriage and our children as emotional blackmail._

That's what she wanted to say, but she also wanted to stop going around and around in these incessant circles, like two boxers wheeling at the edge of the ring, lunging in for the occasional jab before backing off again, but never going in for that knockout punch.

She turned around and leant back against the side, her arms folded across her chest, her left hand hidden beneath her elbow as she nudged her wedding ring around and around with the tip of her thumb. She scowled at Henry. The softness of his expression, suffused with a kind of lovelorn disappointment as though _she_ were the bad guy here, irked her. "You want me to go?"

"No. I want us to work on this, to work through this, but I can't do it alone."

"So, I'm not trying hard enough? Is that what you're saying?"

His mouth opened, and then closed again. Then his lips tweaked into a sorry smile, and he gave a small shrug, both of which only irked her even more. "Sometimes it feels like you're just going through the motions, the rest of the time…I guess it feels like you're not trying at all."

The silence in the room ached. It held more gravity than any sound could.

The words carved out a hollow in the centre of her chest, right between her lungs, her heart replaced with a cavern of hurt, whilst the walls of one-way glass shot up around her again, leaving her feeling invisible and alone. _Must try harder? Must try harder? All she'd done all day every day since they'd moved to that house that refused to feel like a home was to try_. Perhaps it wouldn't have hurt half as much had his words not proven that he, the person who was meant to know her better than anyone else did, didn't have a clue.

"Well, thanks for the appraisal, _professor_." She pushed herself away from the countertop, her arms still hugged across her chest, her wedding ring trapping the middle joint of her finger. "I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise to me that, once again, I'm not good enough for you."

"Elizabeth…" He massaged his brow. But then his hand fell back to the table, and he pivoted in his seat. "Where are you going?"

"To bed." She traipsed towards the archway. "In the spare room." Then she added in a mutter, "Wouldn't want my frigidity to give you cold feet."

A pause. She swore she could feel the frown that descended on Henry's brow before he said, "That doesn't make any sense."

"You don't make any sense."

"Elizabeth…"

* * *

Elizabeth propped the scoop outside the stall door, and then mopped her brow with the sleeve of her shirt and pushed back the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail and plastered themselves to her forehead. A delicious breeze tumbled through the stables. She paused for a moment, and her eyes slipped shut as she let the cool air wash over her. It carried with it the scent of horsehair and hay and the sweetness of manure, and for a moment everything was right in the world and her body floated in a sea of calm. She had no past, no future, no sense of self. Just the breeze and the knowledge that she was home. Only, of course, the home that scent transported her to had been taken from her over twenty-two years ago.

She kept her eyes shut and strained to cling to that feeling of home as she listened to the soft snorts of the horses, the occasional whicker, and the bump of haunches against the walls of the stalls, but it slipped her grasp and unravelled until it was no more tangible than the beams of sunlight that spooled through the gaps between the wooden slats of the door at the far end. When she opened her eyes, even those rays, and the motes of hay dust that had spiralled through them, had gone.

"Hey." Henry's voice came from behind her, at a distance.

She kept her back to him. Her own voice strained as she bent down and heaved up the bale of straw from the dusty stone aisle that ran through the middle of the stalls. "Hey."

"Need a hand?" He kept his distance, possibly because of the box-cutters—blade extended—balanced on top of said bale.

"No…I'm good." She knelt down next to the bale, and with the box-cutters, she sliced through the bright blue baling twine, then threaded the twine free, bundled it up and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans, along with the box-cutters (blade retracted, of course).

The air stiffened with Henry's presence as he continued to lurk near the entrance to the stables. This was the point in the 'conversation' where he was meant to leave. Anything beyond general civilities had become no man's land. Not that he hadn't tried to talk to her or coax her back to their bedroom, but in an admittedly childish way, him telling her '_Must try harder_' had only made her withdraw even more. Silence, as uncomfortable as it might be, was better than facing up to the fact that if things didn't work out between them, then there had been no point in her quitting at all.

"So…I've got a surprise for you."

Elizabeth broke up a chunk of the bale and scattered the straw across the stone floor. _Perhaps frigid was starting to look appealing after no more than a box of Kleenex for company._ "Well, if it's macaroni glued to a piece of paper, I'm afraid your offspring have already beaten you to the punch."

"He's blonde, five foot eleven, a little rough around the edges."

She stopped. She shook the last of the straw free from her hands, though a few straggles clung to the gloves. Then she peeled off the gloves too, and she poked her head out of the stall, a frown sitting heavy on her brow. With the shade of the stables, the entranceway formed a block of aching white light, and it cast Henry and her 'surprise' into silhouette.

But she would know that silhouette anywhere.

A smile sprang to her lips, and she strode over as fast as she could without spooking the horses, the heels of her boots tapping off the stone.

Leant in the doorway, with his arms folded across his chest, Will grinned back at her. "So…I heard you quit being a spook and moved to a horse farm."

He opened his arms to her and caught her embrace as she flung her arms around him. He held her tight as they rocked from foot to foot.

Out of the corner of her eye, Henry smiled at the sight of the pair of them, lingered there for a moment, and then, without a word, he turned and headed back to the house.

"I've been emailing you." She fisted the back of Will's faded blue shirt, the shade a match to the plaid pattern of her own.

"I don't do emails."

She pushed him back and held him by the shoulder. A pointed stare. "Oh, and do you not do calls or texts either?"

"I've been busy." He shrugged her off.

"You know that when I don't hear from you—"

"You think I've fallen down a hole, I know." He flapped aside her concern, and then gestured towards the horses in the stalls. "So, which one's mine?"

* * *

Clemmie, a flea-bitten grey mare, led the way at an ambling pace along the hoof-worn track that curved in a trough of dusty brown through the ankle-high grasses around the edge of the field. Elizabeth's body swayed with the rhythm. The motion lulled and soothed, whilst the sun warmed her with its sleepy caress. It felt like those summer evenings back when she and Will were children. They'd set out on a hack after dinner, when the heat of the day had faded to a smoulder and the sunlight was bleeding into amber, and at first, as they wove across the field in front of the house, they'd bicker over who'd started what argument that day, but by the time they reached the track that hugged the edge of the old quarry, they'd have settled into a comfortable silence, one that would see them through the hour or so until they returned home and to their normal spats—a silence much like the one that flowed between them now. For them, silence was an absence of conflict, something to savour. Not like the silence that simmered between her and Henry, itself a form of conflict, and one that left a bitter taste in the mouth.

When Clemmie turned the corner onto the side of the field lined with a row of poplar trees and the path split into two, Will urged Jay-Jay on with a clicking of the tongue, and a moment later, the chestnut gelding drew in line. With the sunlight filtering through the glossy green leaves, shadows dappled the track ahead, and each time the breeze bristled through the trees, the pattern of light and shade rippled like water.

"So…" Will cast Elizabeth a sideways glance. "I was surprised to hear that you quit your job and moved to a horse farm."

"I'm surprised that you bothered to visit. Do you know how many times I called you?"

"Signal's not so great in Niger. And of course I'd visit… Need to see my favourite niblings some time." That smirk of his crept into his voice, so she didn't even need to look at him to know that it was there. _God, how it irked her._

She shot him a glare. "That's not a word, _Will_, and they're your only nieces and nephew."

"Then I guess that makes you my favourite sister too."

Another lilt of a breeze rustled through the poplars and set the leaves churning. Elizabeth leant forward in the saddle, one hand on the pommel to steady her, and she patted Clemmie's shoulder. The mare was dead broke in theory, but she still spooked at the trees from time to time.

Will's gaze prickled against Elizabeth's cheek. It lingered on her for a moment too long, and then flitted to the track ahead for half a second before it returned to her once more. "Seriously, Lizzie, what's going on with you?"

"Nothing."

"Really? Because you seem awfully tetchy with Henry."

"Upending your whole life can put a strain on a relationship. Not that you would know. I've had a longer and more serious relationship with the carton of yoghurt in my refrigerator than you've had with any one of your girlfriends."

"Lashing out at me…"

"That's just what we do."

A funnel of sunshine flooded through the gap where one of the trees had been felled. The dry heat swept over Elizabeth's skin, like the sting of hot sands. For a split second she was back in Iraq. Sand in her mouth. Sand in her lungs. Sand in her wounds. _Mitch!…Mitch!… _An arm snaked around her waist and hauled her away from the smouldering debris— But then Clemmie stepped back into the shade. And the coolness was so bitter that a chill ached through her bones.

Will's gaze remained hot on her. That would have irked her as well, had her energy not just been sapped into an emotional sinkhole located in the pit beneath her breastbone. "Henry says that you're struggling to adjust, that you're 'away with the horses' a lot."

She gave a half-hearted snort. "His phrase or yours?"

"I know you, Lizzie, and I know how you get."

"It's a big change, that's all."

"One that you're thinking of going back on?"

She shook her head. "It's not like I have a choice."

"But you would if you could?"

Her voice strained. "It's complicated, Will."

"Then talk me through it."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek and shook her head again. It wasn't just that she didn't want to talk about it, but that he would never understand. If he faced the same decision, he'd never put his family first. If he had a family, that was. "Can't we just talk about something else?"

A pause. The silence that spun out between them now wasn't half as comfortable as before, even the once soothing whisper of the breeze through the poplar trees now bristled up the back of her neck, causing it to tighten, and her body no longer swayed with Clemmie's lolling stride, but rolled and lurched.

All the while, Will's gaze kept alternating between her and the path ahead. "Remember that year when Mom and Dad sent us to that summer camp? Neither of us wanted to go, and we launched a full on protest about how unfair it was that they'd made the choice for us and we didn't get a say in the matter…you might even have started a petition… and Mom turned to us and said—"

"'It's happening, so now you've got the choice to make the most of it or to make yourselves miserable.'" Her lips quirked at the memory, and she gave a huff of a laugh. _That was Mom. All love and no nonsense_. But the smile soured within an instant, and the emotional sinkhole yawned until it felt as though it might suck the air from her lungs.

With one hand still rested against the pommel, her hold on the reins loose, she twisted around and looked at Will. "I'm not choosing to make myself miserable. It just doesn't feel like home."

He copied her stance, though his grip on the reins remained a touch tighter. Jay-Jay was bombproof, wouldn't spook even if a red wolf leapt out onto the track, but she hadn't told Will that—wouldn't want him to think that she was 'wrapping him in cotton wool'. "And it won't feel like home so long as you want to be in two places at once, or want to be somewhere else. You need to decide, and when you have decided, you need to let the other option go."

"It's not that easy. The CIA was part of who I am, it was my identity."

"Then why quit?"

"Because it was the right thing to do. For the kids, for my marriage."

He studied her. It felt like his gaze was peeling back the layers one by one in search of a hidden truth. "And you couldn't have both?"

"No."

"So you decided to be a martyr?"

She scowled at him. "I'm not being a martyr, _Will_."

"Then stop acting like one." His voice sharpened. "Either put it behind you, or go get your job back, pack your bags and I'll sublet you the spare room in my condo."

She scoffed. "Well, that's never going to happen."

"You've got options, Lizzie. You can stay here and make the most of it, or you can leave and do something else, but don't stay here and make yourself—and everybody else—miserable."

She glared at him for several unremitting seconds. She wasn't making herself miserable. She wasn't making anybody else miserable. That was the problem: everybody else was fine and she wasn't.

Apart from Henry; he wasn't fine.

He had been after that initial hiccup on moving day, but as time dragged on and she got more and more exhausted from keeping up the pretence of smiley-happy-normal, his own enthusiasm for their new life had waned. At first he'd lavished them with home-cooked meals almost every day, but after a few evenings of her picking over the food and leaving half a plate, those pasta bakes and chicken casseroles had given way to whatever could be foraged from the freezer or thrown together from a can or two. While they had unpacked the Giant Jenga tower of cardboard boxes, he'd rhapsodised about his grand plans for redecorating the upper floor, but after she couldn't bring herself to care whether he should paint the spare room 'Almond White' or 'Milky Pail' talk of those plans had tempered, and now that she'd moved into said spare room, 'Moot Point' might have been a more fitting hue. Once she'd started at UVA, he'd turned up at her office every day at one o'clock on the dot with cheese, tuna, or peanut butter sandwiches and a thermos of coffee for two, but those requests for a lunch date on the quad had stopped after the third or fourth time she'd turned him down: _I've got a mountain of papers to mark, and these kids are seriously embracing 'If you don't know it, just bullshit' as their motto_.

Was she trying hard enough? Or had he been right to call her out for not trying at all?

When Will refused to back down from her glare, she twisted away to face the path, and with a nudge of the heel, she urged Clemmie on. Ahead of them, the two tracks of dust and baked earth stretched into the distance; it felt as though if they walked far enough, eventually the paths would converge. But for each step that they took, that point of unity drifted a step further away. That's what it felt like with Henry at the moment. _One step at a time_, but never getting closer to the end, to a time when they could be as together as they had been before Baghdad Station Part One. Giving up the job she was passionate about for the man she was passionate about made her yearning for the former grow and her yearning for the latter dwindle. And although Will wasn't wrong to say that she needed to put the decision behind her if she was to move on, it was hard to let go of something when she already felt hollow. What was emptier than empty?

She hated that she loved Henry enough to let him do this to her, and she loved to hate him for it.

With time, the silence between her and Will settled to something near comfortable once more; it was interlaced with the rays of sunshine that snuck through the poplar leaves and the rise and fall of birdsong. It felt sweeter, somehow, knowing that normally Will would argue his point until he'd beaten her into the ground, but this time he'd said his piece and then backed off, giving her the space she needed to mull it over. The thought crept up on her, and out of nowhere, it hit her with a swell of gratitude. The feeling bloomed like a golden yellow rose in her chest. _I know you, Lizzie_. He did, more than she cared to admit. He saw her struggles too. And though she hoped she wouldn't reach the stage where she felt the need to take Will up on the offer of a spare room in his condo, it was comforting to know that there was a place out there for her to retreat to and that with him she'd always have a home.

Clemmie and Jay-Jay carried them past the end of the row of poplars, and then up onto the gently sloping crest of the grassy hill. They stopped at the top for a moment. A breeze tumbled in and it ruffled the stalks of grass that rolled away before them, a churning sea with its waves that rippled down towards the splintered-white farmhouse across the expanse of fields.

"You know what you need if you want it to feel like home?"

Elizabeth looked to Will with a frown.

"A goat."

She shook her head. Vehement. "Uh uh. No way."

"Why not?"

"There'll be no interspecies romances on this farm."

He held up one finger: an objection, a correction. "Billy's love for Bunny was pure."

She snorted. "I'm pretty sure the size difference had a lot to do with that. That, and the fact that it was unrequited. I'm surprised Bunny didn't just kick him away."

He chuckled. His smile lingered, but with each passing second it grew a touch paler, more translucent, until it was no more than a ghost. "God, I miss that goat."

"Me too," she murmured, the strength of her voice lost as the emotional sinkhole ached with all it had swallowed. She opened her mouth, and then stopped when she realised she didn't have anything to say. What _could_ she say?

It pained her that they shared this language of the unspoken, but at the same time it comforted her that at least the fact that they shared in it meant that she wasn't alone.

After a minute or so had passed, a memory popped up, as unbidden as a chunk of undersea iceberg that had broken loose and bobbed up to the surface, and her smile erupted once more. "Do you remember that time—possibly the only time—when Aunt Joan came to visit and Billy practically barricaded her in her car? Just stood there bleating at her incessantly. And that _look_ that he gave her."

Will's smirk reappeared too. This time it didn't irk her at all. "I always said that goat was an excellent judge of character."

Her smile widened. The blossom in her chest continued to bloom. Home. Not a place, but the people. Not a location, but a mood. Where memories are born and stored, and where you long to come back to. With a squeeze, she nudged Clemmie into a walk, and on Jay-Jay, Will followed. Her body swayed as they lumbered down the hill. "And remember when…"

* * *

With the horses brushed down and the tack cleaned and stowed, Elizabeth and Will strode towards the farmhouse, where Henry and the kids sat on the porch. Henry perched on the top step, his knees loosely gathered in the circle of his arms, whilst he twisted around and chatted to the kids who were sprawled amidst an ocean of Duplo, chunky crayons and plastic horses on the wooden boards behind. The laughter still bubbled between her and Will, enriched with their jibes at each other for past embarrassments and indiscretions—a sting of salt to bring out the sweetness and stop it from straying into saccharine. That wasn't them. Her cheeks ached from smiling, and it felt good, but it also served as a bitter reminder that she hadn't had reason to laugh or smile like that in months.

"Ready?" Will said, but before she had time to reply, he curled his forefinger and thumb to his lips and let out a high-pitched whistle, sharp enough to make a dog's ears prick.

The kids' heads jerked up. Half a second later, their faces flashed with excitement, and they scrambled to their feet and threw themselves down the steps with squeals of, "Uncle Will!"

Elizabeth shot Will an incredulous look. "Can you not treat my children like dogs?"

"Only if you stop being a bitch to your husband." He sent her that smirk. And it only grew when she jabbed him in the arm. Hard. He'd probably wear the bruise with all the pride of a battle wound. "As much as I like you, Lizzie, and although you know the offer always stands, it would seriously cramp my style if you did end up living in my spare room."

"Uncle Will! Uncle Will!" The kids slammed into Will, a three-pronged football tackle, and almost toppled him to the grass.

Elizabeth watched them for a moment as all three kids clamoured for Will's attention whilst he made all the appropriate comments about how much they'd grown and how he barely recognised them and how surely they must be old enough to drive already—_No? Are you sure?_ She smiled to herself and gave a small huff of a laugh. When she turned to Henry, she found him sporting a smile to match her own. But as their eyes met, both smiles faded slightly, encumbered.

With her gaze fixed on the ground in front of her and a tightness in her chest, she trudged over the grass, onto the path, and then up the steps. Her boots tapped off the wood. Henry's gaze remained hot on her; perhaps he thought she would stride straight past him and into the house. Perhaps that would be easier, at least in the short run. God knew she wanted to.

But she didn't. Instead, she lowered herself down onto the top step, so that she sat next to him, and she hugged her knees loosely towards her chest, the balls of her feet pressed to the step below. Though she and Henry were close enough that her skin prickled with his presence and each breath bore billows of his scent, it felt like miles stretched between them. That distance hurt her more than the thought of the words that had forced it did.

They sat in silence. On the grass, the kids were taking it in turns to clamber onto Will's back, before yelling at him to spin them around and around whilst they clung to his neck in a chokehold. Their giggles filled the air, a kind of effervescence that fizzled up, and Elizabeth couldn't help but smile softly to herself. This is what she'd imagined having children would be like. Sunshine. Laughter. Endless summer afternoons of running around outdoors. Of course, she soon learnt the reality of night feeds, laundry—lots of laundry—and nagging the kids over homework and chores. But moments like this made the rest of it worth it. They were snatches of light, infrequent, but so bright that, for a moment, they blinded her to everything else.

In their bubble of sunshine, the kids seemed oblivious to the shade that hung over the porch. The silence between her and Henry dragged on. It stagnated. And it was moments like _this_ that make her feel like maybe she should have gone to Baghdad, even if it meant missing out on these precious bursts of childhood. After all, it was Will who got to laugh and play with them now, whilst she sat in the sombre hush and shadows of the porch. Had she known that this was what life would be like, the decision might not have been half as hard. _If you go to Baghdad, I don't know what things will look like when you come back_. Bleaker than they looked now?

"I know I can't make this feel like home for you," Henry murmured, his tone thick and gruff.

She twisted around to face him. Her gaze raked over his expression and lingered on the worry lines that had sunk deeper over the past weeks and months. "So you thought you'd bring a piece of home to me instead?"

A small shrug. A flinch of the lips. "Something like that."

She shook her head to herself, turned away again, and stared out across the grass. "I told you it isn't your job to make me happy."

"I know… But did it work?"

She paused. Seeing Will again after God knows how many months, falling back into the comfort of their own routine whilst the rest of her life felt so uncertain, sharing memories from their childhood, remembering that sense of home… "It did."

Alison slipped down from Will's back and chased after her straw hat, which had whipped off when Will spun her around and now wheeled across the grass, whilst Jason babbled on and on about how smoke detectors worked. (He had seen a programme on TV last week, and now felt the need to recite the information verbatim to anyone who didn't ask.) Will pretended to be fascinated, but at the same time he shot Elizabeth a look as though to say—_Is your child entirely normal?_

Elizabeth chuckled. She sent Henry a sideways glance. "God…our son is so weird."

"Yeah…I've been meaning to tell you."

"Do you reckon that's an Adams thing or is it down to your Y chromosome?"

"I'm going to go with 'no comment' on that one."

She gave a '_hah_'. Then she nudged her knee against his. "Thank you for today. For Will."

He nudged her knee in return. "You're welcome." Then he twisted around and picked up the lurid orange box of ginger snaps that he had tucked between himself and the railings of the porch. He held the packet out to her. "Biscuit?"

She shook her head. "Horse hands."

She had given her hands a quick rinse in the sputter of water from the outside tap when she had put out fresh buckets for Clemmie and Jay-Jay, but the smell of horsehair and sweat and the leather of the reins still stained her palms. Not that it particularly bothered her. But it was better than admitting that she wasn't entirely sure where '_One step at a time_' would take them next, or if it was somewhere she wanted to go.

He placed the box down behind him. "Jason's been force-feeding me them again. Not exactly going to help with my efforts to fend off the not-quite-middle-aged spread."

"That ship sailed a while ago, I'm afraid."

A pause. Then— "Well, that hurt."

She turned to him. Though he tried to hide it, a genuine hurt lingered in his eyes. It stung her in turn, a pang to the chest. His body had softened since he had returned to his studies and then migrated into the world of academia; his muscles still very much there, but a little less defined. She didn't realise that it bothered him, and it certainly didn't bother her.

"I prefer you like this."

He gave her a puzzled look. "Really?"

"Don't get me wrong, the whole Marine thing was _hot_, but it doesn't do wonders for a girl's self-esteem."

The puzzled look continued. "So, it's a case of 'I like my body when it is with your body'?"

"Something like that." A soft smile crept to her lips. It lingered for a moment before its corners faltered and fell away, and as it subsided, she returned her gaze to the grass, where Will had now collapsed on the ground, protesting that he needed a rest and couldn't possibly swing the kids around anymore. The kids weren't having any of it. Alison and Stevie had each taken hold of a hand, and were trying to haul him up, whilst Jason had segued into the intricacies of sprinkler systems and had decided that the best approach to getting Will back to his feet was to squash his ribcage.

The silent stillness between her and Henry drifted into place again, like tendrils of evening mist that seemingly rose up from nowhere to swathe the fields. There was a comfort in the awkward ease of their fragments of conversation. It felt like a nod to all the years they had spent together and the understanding they had accumulated day by day, but at the same time, it was a reminder that this was what they had been reduced to. And that even this, they might lose. The porch swing creaked behind them in the breath of the breeze. The cool air crawled up the back of her neck. Had they been sat in the sunshine, it might have been pleasant, but in the shade, it carried a chill. At least the kids were immune. She kept her gaze on them, whilst she worried her wedding ring around her finger and tension crept across her brow.

The ring eased over the middle joint, and she stilled. She didn't look at Henry when she spoke. "I resent you, Henry. I resent that you used our children and our marriage to coerce me. I understand why you did it, but I still resent you for it. And being here rather than at our old house, teaching rather than being at Langley, dealing with normal, mundane life rather than feeling like I'm in the midst of this _thing_ that's shaping the future of the world…it reminds me of everything I gave up for you. And every time I think about it, it makes me resent you a little bit more."

The seconds dragged beneath the weight of the words. It made them lumber to twice their normal length. After a while, it felt as though maybe time had ground to a stop altogether. Or at least time on the porch. In the sunshine, the world spun on. Oblivious.

For a moment, she wished she hadn't said the words at all, that she and Henry could have idled in the feigned lightness of inconsequential thoughts. But only for a moment.

"I know," Henry said. A pause. "And I resent you too."

She twisted around and frowned at him. "You do?"

He nodded. His gaze dipped away from hers and through the circle formed by his arms as he rested his elbows to his knees and folded his hands in front of him; it settled on the third or fourth step of the porch. A sadness tinged the corners of his eyes and his tone. "I resent that you ever even considered leaving me and the kids. I resent that you found this decision so difficult and it took you so long to decide. I resent that since you've decided, you've made it seem like some kind of moral obligation rather than something you actually want. I resent that rather than telling me that you resent me, you shut me out and try to pretend like it doesn't bother you. I resent that you think I can't see that it bothers you. I resent that we now live in this limbo where, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't be surprised to wake up one morning and find that you've gone…" He paused. He swallowed with a thick clunk. He looked up and met her eye. "I resent that you make me feel like I can't say any of this to you without starting an argument and provoking you into walking out for good. I resent that you make me feel so angry and ashamed of myself for even thinking any of that after you've given up the career that you love for me. I resent you for making me love you so much that I'd risk everything we have just so that I don't lose you."

The world around them fell into silence now. It strained on its axis and stopped.

Henry's eyes glistened. No longer green and brown, but fear and hurt. Perhaps life wasn't so perfect outside the walls of one-way glass after all.

He let his hand drift across, as though to lay it on her knee, and as he did, she turned away from him and her chin dipped. She wished she'd worn her hair loose so that it would have fallen between them and veiled her from the look in his eyes; but then again, even if she had, it had already seeped into her mind.

The touch never came.

Guilt rolled through her in waves of lead. She knew the soul-emptying wrench of loss, and she never—_never_—wanted to put him through that, to keep putting him through it as he tormented himself over whether she still might leave or not. Even worse: she hadn't seen how much he was hurting too, or that her own unhappiness was the cause. Maybe she should have tried harder before, maybe she should have kept up the facade and hoped that one day that feeling of 'home' would follow. But the anger remained. The sand that grated beneath it all. He had no right to feel like that. If he hadn't taken her career from her, if he hadn't made her choose between losing her family or losing her job, then they wouldn't be in this position now. She might have hurt him, but only because he hurt her first.

Will wasn't wrong: she needed to put the decision behind her if she and Henry were ever to move on. But how? And was it even worth it now, if they both resented each other so much?

Her wedding ring sat just above the middle joint of her finger, neither off nor on.

"Tell me what you're thinking."

She shook her head. The end of her ponytail tickled her nape. "I don't know."

"You don't know, or you do know but you don't want to say it?"

Silence. The sound of the kids' squeals, Will's sibilant voice, and the horses' snorts and whinnies filtered through from the background. They jarred against the hush of the porch.

"Elizabeth…" Her name came almost as a sigh. "I love you, and I want us to work through this. But it's not enough for me to want it to work, you need to want it to work too. At the moment, it feels like you're hedging your bets, or maybe you've already given up on us and you can't bring yourself to tell me, or you want to leave but you feel trapped because you've already quit and moved here and started a new job… I don't know. Whatever you're thinking, I'd rather you tell me, so that we at least have the chance to talk about it."

She twisted to face him again, the ring still held above her joint. It felt like that wire loop game; if the gold were to touch her skin, it would hit her with an emotional jolt. "I'm thinking: What if this doesn't work out? What if _we_ don't work out? What if I quit my job for nothing?"

Henry pivoted around so that his back was leant to the chipped-white pillar against which the two wings of railing—one stretching along the front edge of the decking, one sloping down the side of the steps—abutted. "We won't know unless we try."

"But all this _resentment_… I just don't know if that's something that will ever go away."

"It probably won't. But I'm hoping it'll fade with time."

_Fade with time_. Her gaze dipped to the footworn boards between them, whilst her mind latched onto Will's voice that still floated in the background.

She forced herself to meet Henry's eye. "That's what people kept telling me after our parents died. The pain, the grief, the emptiness that aches so much that it makes you want to scream…it'll fade with time." She shook her head, and looked away again. "It doesn't though, it just changes. It sinks down and becomes a part of you."

"A part of you. But it doesn't define you. This decision doesn't have to define us."

"It's already changed us."

He massaged his brow. It looked like he was scrambling for a response. His arm fell away again and came to rest atop the knee still bent towards his chest. "You once told me that grief made you stronger. Getting through this can make us stronger too." He motioned between them.

"It's not the same."

"You're the one who drew the comparison." His voice strained with exasperation. He looked up to the ceiling of the porch, took a deep breath and then huffed it out before he met her eye once more. "It feels like no matter what I say, I can't win, like you're just looking for an excuse."

"An excuse for what?"

"An excuse to give up on us." He let the words sink in. Gold touched her skin. The jolt felt more like a stomach punch. "It feels like you don't even want to try and make this work."

"Says the man who wasn't willing to try and make it work if I went Baghdad."

They held each other's gaze as the silence throbbed between them. Each beat dragged up snippets of arguments past. Arguments that it couldn't have worked. Arguments that she was delusional if she really thought she'd be gone one year, maybe two at the most. Arguments that the only way she would have come back to them was in a wooden box—_That's if your body's not been blown into a million pieces_. Arguments over whether or not this was any different from his tours.

The silence said it all for them. The silence thirsted for one of them to make a comment and plunge them back into that maelstrom of never-ending punch and counterpunch.

"Tell me what you want." Henry continued to stare at her, the maelstrom reflected in his eyes. "Not what you think you should say, or what you feel obligated to say, but what you want."

"I want both. I want the job, and I want you and the kids. But you said I couldn't have both, so I picked you." She thrust her hand towards him. On the opposite hand, her ring fell snug over the middle joint of her finger and pinched the bone. Part of her wished it had fallen off. "And maybe I made that choice because it was the right thing to do, but it's also because I don't want to be without you. Even when I hate you, I don't want to be without you."

The anger in Henry's voice matched her own. "And I only put you in that situation because I don't want to be without you. I hurt you, I know that, and I can't promise you that I won't hurt you again. But I can promise you this: I'm never going to give up on us, on you."

The sincerity in his eyes stung. It made her own eyes water and long to look away. Why she'd ever spent summer days lolling on the porch of her first home, staring out across the paddock with a dreamy smile on her face as she fantasised about growing up and falling in love, she didn't know.

Stevie's giggle lit up the background, whilst Alison chanted her way through a garbled version of 'Hollaback Girl' and Jason jabbered on about how the various parts of a fire engine worked. Somewhere amidst that was Will's voice, probably trying to distract the kids from their parents on the porch. Ironic, given that—all those years ago—he was the one who had insisted on destroying her daydreams by yanking away her journal and proclaiming, '_Love sucks_.'

Henry's stare didn't let up. _If only she were invisible now…_ "Given where we are now, what do you want to do? Do you want to commit to making this work or not? I'm all in, but if you don't want this, there's no point in you making yourself unhappy."

She tried to hold his eye, but her gaze faltered and fell away to the infinite darkness of the gap between the wooden boards. She slipped her wedding ring back and forth across the joint, a pinch each time, whilst Will's voice filtered through her mind, '_…don't stay here and make yourself—and everybody else—miserable_.'

Her fingers stilled and she looked up at Henry. Her voice was soft, filled with the wince that crept to her expression. "Are you happy, Henry?"

"I'm happy when you're happy. Seeing you today with Will, laughing and smiling again, just being yourself…that made me happy. But if you don't think you can be happy with me anymore…" His lips flinched rather than finishing that thought. The attempt at a smile or a shrug or whatever it was only made the sadness in his eyes deepen—hazel drowned in black. "…I'd understand."

She turned away from him and looked at her wedding ring, held just above the middle joint, pinched between forefinger and thumb of the opposite hand. Poised in limbo. Neither off nor on.

'_You've got options, Lizzie._'… '_Either put it behind you, or go get your job back, pack your bags and I'll sublet you the spare room in my condo._'

Ever since she first brought up the topic of Baghdad and Henry had given her the ultimatum, she had felt trapped. There hadn't been a choice. Not when the options were 'lose us' or 'quit'. Moving to the horse farm hadn't helped. It was meant to be a fresh start, to help her put the CIA behind her, but instead she found herself missing her old life even more, boxed in by the differences between what had been and what now was. How different it could have been had she not felt compelled to quit, like the decision had truly been her choice. But Will was right: _You've got options, Lizzie. You can stay here and make the most of it, or you can leave and do something else._

She could take off the ring; she could do whatever it took to get her job back; without Henry insisting that she sit at a desk at Langley, she could even go into the field; she could change the way that they operated, and maybe one day she could become the first female director of the CIA; she could stay with Will for a while, until she found a place of her own; she could see the kids as much as the job and the custody agreement would allow. And Henry? The CIA was part of her, she couldn't let it go. But him…?

'_If you don't think you can be happy with me anymore…I'd understand_."

She had a choice.

'_You need to decide, and when you have decided, you need to let the other option go._'

It's hard to let go of something when you already feel hollow. What's emptier than empty?

An opportunity for something new to grow.

She eased her wedding ring over the joint and down until it hugged the bone. She turned to Henry. "I don't want to be happy without you." She twisted around on the step, folded her leg in front of her, and took his hand where it rested atop his knee. Her fingers plucked at his; they craved a touch of that familiar warmth. "I want to find a way to be happy with you again. I just…I feel lost. I feel like I've lost part of myself and like I'm never going to be whole."

"How can I help you?"

She shook her head. Her ponytail trembled and swayed. "I don't know if you can." The chill of a shadow fell across her mind. She searched his eyes. She braced herself for his response. "Is that good enough for you?"

"Do you want to be here with me? Do you want to make this work?"

"Yes."

For the longest moment, his gaze flitted back and forth as though he were scanning her eyes, unable to trust the truth of her words—She could understand that. Yet still it stung. A barb to the heart.—and part of her feared that after everything, after all this indecision and resentment, arguments both voiced and not, maybe he would decide that he couldn't trust her anymore and that perhaps it would be best for him to let her go. She hated that fear for making her life feel so uncertain, and she loved that fear for making her certain that this is what she wanted.

His gaze stopped. His lips tugged into a flat smile, and he squeezed her hand. "Then we'll figure it out."

Her whole body slumped. It felt like a million strings had bound her tight, and all at once they were cut. She rested her forehead to his knee, and her eyes slipped shut. _We'll figure it out._ It wasn't a solution, but it was a start.

She lifted her head and looked up at him. "Why can't life be simple?"

"I thought you liked a challenge." The corners of his lips quirked, and his eyes were alight with their green and brown. He held her gaze for a moment, and then his smile softened. He reached out and tucked the strands of hair that had strayed from her ponytail back behind her ear. "I love you…even if you resent me."

She smiled. "I love you, even if you resent me, too."

They shifted so that they sat side by side again, their feet pressed to the step below, though now they sat close enough that their legs touched, whilst their fingers remained entangled, their forearms resting along the length of their thighs. Henry rubbed his thumb back and forth over her own, and occasionally raised the back of her hand to his lips. Her hands still might smell of horsehair, sweat and leather, but she didn't point it out, and he didn't seem to mind.

The sunshine had now started to creep up the porch step by step, but out on the grass, still drenched in the light's full bloom and ignorant bliss, Jason had given up rambling about smoke detectors, sprinkler systems and fire engines—or perhaps he was just waiting until he had a captive audience at dinnertime, when no doubt he'd regale them once again with the TV's explanation of how fire hydrants worked—and he was making an awkward attempt at a cartwheel, inspired by his sisters, who had frisbee-d away their straw hats, tucked their dresses into their leggings, and were launching themselves across the grass.

It was when Will joined in too that Elizabeth's smile tensed. "God…" She muttered. "He's just a grown up child, isn't he?"

Henry gave a mouth shrug. "Pretty much."

A moment later, Will tumbled to the ground with an 'ooof' and sprawled out on his back. Within half a second, the kids seized the chance and hurled themselves on top of him. It made an NFL pileup look as genial as a game of Victorian-era croquet.

Henry's thumb stilled against Elizabeth's, and his grip tightened a fraction. There was more than a touch of concern to his tone. "Do you think maybe we should help him?"

She considered that for a moment, whilst Jason straddled Will's chest and then bounced up and down. "Not yet… He called me a bitch, so I reckon he deserves at least one cracked rib."

Henry turned to her, and she felt more than saw his somewhat wary look, as though she'd just announced she wasn't entirely against the use of cruel and unusual punishment, and if he wasn't careful, she might dish it out on him next. Though, that depended on the definition of cruel and unusual, and Will always gave as good as he got.

A thought struck her, and she whipped around to face Henry. "And no matter what he tells you, I do _not_ want a goat."

Henry's frown deepened. "Um. Okay… Why would you want a goat?"

"Because of Billy." _Duh._

He stared at her blankly.

"Billy the Kid." When he continued to stare at her and blank drifted towards mild horror, her eyes widened and she thrust one hand at him. "Our pet goat."

He looked at her. The look said, 'What on God's earth have I married into?', or something a little cruder. His voice strained with incredulity. "You had a pet goat called 'Billy the Kid'?"

She drew back and folded her leg so that it rested between them. "Come on. I must have told you."

"I'm pretty sure I would have remembered you telling me that. And let's remember, you didn't tell me you'd streaked the Lawn either."

She smirked, and gave a small shrug. "A girl's gotta have some secrets."

"So…apart from pet goats and public nudity, is there anything else I ought to know about?"

Her nose wrinkled. "I'm not going to give up my secrets that easily."

He studied her. An _almost_ playful glimmer lit his eyes. "What's your price?"

Her heartbeat quickened a fraction. Then her gaze dipped away from his. And, _God_, her palms had started to sweat. But she needed him to know that she was serious about this, about them, that she was going to try harder, that this was it now. All in. She plucked at the seam of her jeans that ran along the length of her calf, busying her fingers, and then she gave a shrug. Totally nonchalant. "Dinner at that barbecue joint we're always driving past."

The warmth of his smile washed over her. "Are you asking me on a date, Elizabeth McCord?"

She shook her head, totally causal. Though she still didn't meet his eye. "It's a simple transaction, you get to learn something about me, I get food that hasn't come off a factory line."

"Quoting me from our one-and-a-halfth date?" he teased. But then he laid his hand against her knee, and his tone softened. "I'd love to go on a date with you."

She looked up at him with a soft smile. "Good."

But the slight tightness in her chest hadn't eased. She opened her mouth, and then stopped. Her gaze fell away again, and as her chin dipped, the strands of hair that he had tucked behind her ear swayed forward. There was one thing she needed to set him straight on.

She covered his hand where it rested on her knee, and she forced herself to meet his eye. "I think it's sexy that you eat real food, not protein bars. I love it that you let our weird son force-feed you biscuits, and that you make fairy cakes with our girls. I think it's hot that you keep fit trying to keep our unruly brood in line rather than pumping iron at the gym. I like it that you ditch your Sunday morning run to cuddle with me in bed." She squeezed his hand, and prayed she hadn't just insulted him even more. "That's what your body means to me."

He stared at her.

Seconds spiralled into nothingness.

She didn't know exactly what response she was looking for. Perhaps a self-derisive remark to mask the hint of smugness that would creep into his smile; perhaps a quote plucked out of God only knows where to brush aside her comment along with his embarrassment; or maybe just a simple 'I like your body too'.

But his smile had dimmed, and his eyes glistened again, and he just stared at her.

She gave an inward groan—_God…when will you learn to just keep your mouth shut?_ She pinched the bridge of her nose, and fought off the cringe that tensed through her jaw. "Henry…I—"

"Can I kiss you?"

Her eyes snapped open, and she frowned. "What?"

"I'd like to kiss you, but I didn't want to presume…" He wore the same sincere look, but the hint of a blush had warmed his cheeks.

She gave a quick shake of the head. Her ponytail whipped back and forth. "No. Kissing's good."

He hesitated. His expression turned a touch uncertain, perhaps pained. When she gave him a questioning look—_What was he waiting for?_—he let out a stream of a sigh and ruffled one hand through his hair. He met her eye, and the blush deepened. "Struggling with the syntax here. No kissing's good? Or, no, I'm not presuming; and yes, kissing's good?"

"Oh…" Her gaze sailed away towards the red bricks of the stables. _Hadn't thought of that._ She squeezed his hand and returned her gaze to his with a gentle smile. "Kissing's good. And for future reference, kissing's definitely good." She raised her shoulders in an awkward shrug. "But I think we might just about have killed the moment."

He chuckled, and he looked down to their hands linked in her lap. "You could say that."

At a strangled cry from the grass, both of them snapped their heads around. The kids hadn't let up their assault on Will, and now Jason was smothering Will's face.

"And I think our son might just have killed my brother." She tugged at Henry's hand. "Please can you go save him before one—or all—of our offspring seriously maims him?"

"Sure." He pushed himself up from the top step of the porch, dusted his hands off against his jeans, and jogged down the steps towards the path.

"And, Henry?"

He stopped one step from the bottom, and turned back to face her, his hand steadying him against the chipped-white handrail. He waited.

"This…us…it'll get easier, won't it?"

The corners of his lips twinged. "We'll keep working until it does."

He paused for a moment, and then scrambled up the steps again, taking them two at a time. He knelt in front of her, in between her feet, and cupped her cheek, his palm warm against her skin, his fingertips the right amount of calloused, just enough to bring friction and ignite the supple. With his gaze locked on hers, he brushed his thumb back and forth across the sweep of her cheekbone, and then drew her in for a kiss.

The kiss was sweet, but tentative. It felt like they were kissing better the tender flesh of a bruise, wanting to soothe away the pain, yet wary that too much pressure could release another jolt. The tentativeness itself caused her heart to ache, as did the awkwardness of the exchange of moments before. The language between them had devolved from full-fledged fluency to a clumsy pidgin tongue—one that held the hurt that lingered beneath this brief burst of brightness at its core.

But hurt was good too. Hurt meant they still cared. After all, home was the people with whom you allowed yourself to be most vulnerable, and home could hurt you like nothing else.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, and clung to the sweet simplicity of his lips against hers. Communication, as clumsy as it might be at the moment, was better than the bitter words that festered in the silence. The kiss was a fresh start. It was hope. Hope that he was right, and that the resentment would fade with time; hope that she—or they—would figure out a way for her to find fulfilment and fill in the hollow left by the CIA; hope that as she did, and as they renewed this commitment to one another each and every day, that feeling of home would grow.

Like most things in life so complex that people had no choice but to resort to clichés, it would be a journey. A long one. But Henry was right: she liked a challenge. And more than anything, she hoped that they would make it through.

When he drew back, he pressed another quick kiss to her forehead with a murmur of—'_I love you_.'—and then turned and hurried down the steps. He strode over the tufted grass, raised the fore- and middle fingers of both hands to his lips, and let out a piercing whistle.

Whilst the kids scrambled off their uncle and Henry wrapped his hand around Will's arm and hauled him to his feet, Elizabeth smiled to herself and touched her fingers to her own lips. She gave a soft snort.

He tasted of ginger snaps. _Of course_.

* * *

**Thursday, 13th December, 2018**

**9:11 AM**

"Are you actually listening to me, or have you gotten so used to living here that you think it's normal for people to talk to themselves?"

Rivulets of rain streaked the fogged glass like a network of translucent veins and blurred the helicopter that waited on the water-wilted lawn behind the clinic. In the dull light that soaked through the cloak of slate blue clouds, the drab green paintwork almost blended in with the grass.

"You mean you _don't_ talk to yourself?" Elizabeth shot Russell a glance over her shoulder. She paused for a moment, her eyebrows arched at him where he leant back in the spindle-back chair that he'd swung to the centre of the carpet, one of his legs slung over the other, his hands held out to the sides and awaiting her response, though perhaps not that response, and then she twisted back to face the window. Her arms were hugged across her chest despite the dry heat pumped out by the radiators; the pressure on her bruises just enough to tether her to the present. "Bad night, that's all."

The dream clung to her like the smell of sweat; a waft of it never more than a movement away. Each time her eyes closed for longer than a blink, she felt her body hurtling down through the shadows, and her muscles gave a jerk. That could be all the caffeine though. She had drunk so much of that foul-tasting 'coffee' that her tongue had furred, and she wouldn't be surprised if her tastebuds had been insulted into annihilation. They'd probably opted to self-destruct the moment she started sipping on the second double-shot cup. Needs must, though.

"I thought you'd be glad to finally be granted your freedom."

"So did I." Her voice was distant, as though it came not from her, but from the vague reflection of her trapped behind the streaks of rain and the haze of condensation on the window. She turned her chin to her shoulder. "Though, I'm not sure if freedom's the right word."

"It's only until the threat level's returned to normal." He thought she meant the squadron of DS and Secret Service agents who would be guarding her, her house, her street, her neighbourhood… and whatever other precautions he'd spent the last half hour or so lecturing her on.

She didn't say otherwise.

She returned to staring into the glass. "You mean when it's just your regular, garden-variety nutjobs with an opinion and a firearms licence?"

"Beats known associates of the GRU."

_God…was this really what 'glass half full' had come to?_

She turned around and leant back against the edge of the oak dressing table; as she did, the dressing table nudged against the wall behind with a muffled thump and the mirror balanced on top rocked and then settled. "Any word on Volkov?"

"The Russians are questioning him, apparently." Russell's voice dragged, an air of resigned indifference as he smoothed his navy blue tie against his shirt and then examined its end as though there were something fascinating to be found amongst the pinprick dots of white. "But either he's got lips tighter than Kennedy versus Nixon, or their interrogators haven't gotten creative enough yet. Assuming, of course, that they haven't just checked him into a five star luxury spa and are keeping him plied with caviar, vodka and Miss Volgograds."

She gave him a look, unimpressed. "You do know your cynicism is presumed, Russell. I don't need you to remind me of it every time we talk."

He shrugged. "Pays to bear the possibility in mind." He leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows against his thighs, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. He stared up at her over the wiry frames of his glasses. Behind the sheen on the lenses, his eyes shone with something approximating to reassurance. "We're keeping the pressure on, okay…? We'll find Kostov."

It didn't reassure her. She stared past him, towards the closed door where the shadow of someone walking past drifted across the privacy slats of the window. The gnarling roil at the pit of her stomach grew. That might also be the caffeine, though. Or skimping on breakfast.

"Once we're finished at the White House, DS and the Secret Service will escort you home from there. You can take the weekend with your family—if you want—then it's back at State on Monday." He pushed himself up from the chair, picked up the charcoal grey suit jacket he'd hung off the back, and stuffed his arms into the sleeves. "I'll liaise with your PR team about press statements et cetera—" He flipped up and then smoothed down the collar. "—you'll have to brace yourself for a few news cycles, but soon enough some senator will get caught doing something that he shouldn't be doing—" He fiddled with the plastic buttons at the cuffs; they shot off gleams of reflected light. "—and every other senator who does the exact same thing but thinks that no one knows about it will leap to take the moral high ground like it's some kind of shield for their own misdemeanours. Meanwhile, you'll keep your head down and we'll work on highlighting all your great policy work—or whatever adjective your speechwriter deigns to provide us with—and selling your success with the deal over the BSR." With his hands on his hips, he gave a flinch of the shoulders. "And then everything can go back to normal."

"Right…" she muttered.

He jerked his head towards the door. "So, if you're ready…?"

Though, of course, everything wouldn't go back to normal.

Her gaze drifted towards the bag that she'd dumped in front of the chest of drawers after having packed it—and then unpacked and repacked it three or four times—at five thirty-five that morning, when the threat of staff doing their rounds meant that seeking refuge from her dream in the 'coffee' and magazines of the patients' lounge was no longer viable. Will's voice circled through her mind, '_Go home if you want, do whatever you like, but I'm not going to be a part of it_.' She could still feel the pressure on top of her head from where he'd kissed her, and that gut-curling realisation that he meant it when he said that he would cut her out of his life; that in one tender gesture he was telling her that he was no longer prepared to be part of 'them' anymore; that unless she changed, he was saying goodbye and letting her go.

But he'd come round with time. Right? He would need something from her at some point, or he would forget why he was mad at her. He always did.

Though something about this was different. Normally his anger came from her 'interfering' with his life in some way, if by 'interfering' he meant her trying to protect him or hold his family together. The time she'd argued her case as to why he shouldn't join Doctors Without Borders; the time she'd brought him back from Syria when terrorists were beheading aid workers; the time she'd gone out of her way to get him the interview at Walter Reed so that he could finally settle down. This time his anger came from something else. Fear, maybe? Or at least that was her best ex-CIA analyst take on it. Also from a want to protect her, himself, and others. '_You're my sister, Lizzie, and despite what you might think, I love you. But I'm not prepared to keep doing this unless you start putting yourself first. Because if you don't…you're not the only one who'll end up getting hurt_.'

But he was overreacting. Right? She was better. She certainly wasn't in the same state she'd been in when she first came to the clinic—that night when Henry had held fear in his eyes and looked as though he'd lost her. Those thoughts had gone, she was talking openly in her sessions, she was managing her triggers. With time, Will would see that she could cope and that she was the same person as before.

But that was the problem: '_I know you, Lizzie Adams…I know that you're just the same as you were on the day we were poisoned, and that's how I know that, despite whatever you've led everyone here to believe, if the same thing were to happen again next week, there's not a single thing you'd do different._' It would be easier to refute that point had she not once again found herself worrying about him and resorting to chasing away dreams with coffee. Even now, the thought of having to go to sleep and the possibility of the dream lurking in wait for her made her dread each second that carried her closer to nightfall. Could she trust herself now when she had known—had _known_—that she was 'fine' and 'coping' and 'fit for work' before? Should she trust him instead?

'_I know you, Lizzie Adams…_' His words from yesterday wove with a subtle echo, something more fragile than a whisper. '_I know you, Lizzie, and I know how you get_.'

The bag sat in front of the chest of drawers, its leather handles flopped towards her. All the clothes Henry had packed for her were stowed inside; she'd wrapped his reading glasses in the soft cotton of his National War College tee after once more breathing in the scent of him laced into the fibres and reassuring herself that she'd find a way to tell him how he could support her, and then she'd tucked the bundle at the top, ready for her to return to him. All she had to do was to pick up the bag and leave. But something—_No more than the flash of a feeling at best_, as Conrad would have described it—tugged at her. The wisp of something reeling her in, like the way her flashbacks could coax her out of the present. What if Will meant what he said? Would home be home without him? And what if he was right? Would the same thing happen again, would she fail to reach out, would her family be hurt because of her?

"Earth to Elizabeth."

At Russell's voice, her gaze snapped up from the bag. She found him staring at her, his eyebrows raised, his eyes wide and expectant. She lowered her arms from where they hugged her chest, and she wrapped her fingers around the edge of the dressing table that she perched against. Her nails dug into the oak. "I don't know."

"You don't know what?" Russell continued to stare at her. A pause. Then a frown dawned on his brow. It darkened his whole expression, as thick as the cloud cover outside. "If this is about the security arrangements, then that's non-negotiable. You're lucky we're not locking you in the safe house equivalent of Alcatraz."

She shook her head. The ends of her hair swayed against her jaw and tickled the skin. "It's not that." It probably wasn't worth pointing out that part of her would prefer to be locked in a safe house. "No…" She stilled and met his eye. "I'm not sure if I'm ready to go home."

"Well, I've got a piece of paper that says you are, so grab your stuff—" He struck one finger towards her bag. "—and let's get you checked out." He turned to the door and grabbed hold of the handle.

"It's not about the piece of paper, Russell."

At her words, he stopped. Slowly, and with a look that seemed to say 'Who are you, and what the hell have you done with Elizabeth McCord?', he turned to face her.

"When I tried to leave before and ending up…_freaking out_—" She tossed the words out with a backhanded sweep. "—I promised myself that the next time I left, I'd be ready—truly ready—to go home." Her fingers curled around the edge of the dressing table again, and then her shoulders tensed towards her ears. "But what if I'm not?"

She let the question hang. It sat in the air between them—a speech bubble.

When he continued to stare at her as though everything she'd just said was in Arabic—or extraterrestrial—she gave a shake of the head and averted her gaze from his. "Someone said something to me yesterday—"

His voice strained. "So long as that someone wasn't inside your own head, I don't care."

She shot him a glare. "I'm serious, Russell."

"And so am I." He eased a step towards her, one finger pointed at her in an almost accusatory fashion. "If this is because you're working yourself up worrying about your family again—"

She gave him a pointed stare. "I'm not '_working myself up_'. And it's not about that." Or at least, not worrying in the sense that he had meant it anyway.

"Then what?" With his shoulders pushed back, he held his hands out wide.

She paused. Then gave an exaggerated shrug. "What if I haven't really changed?"

His scowl deepened. "What do you mean, what if you haven't really changed? I thought that's what this week's panic has all been about: not wanting people to treat you any different."

"I don't want their perception of me to change. I don't want them to treat me like I'm fragile or about to fall apart. But what if not changing means that I just end up going from crisis to crisis to crisis?" Her hand chopped the air three times for emphasis, like a broad-bladed kitchen cleaver. Then she wrapped her fingers over the edge of the wood again and clung tight. "What if I_ need_ to change in order to stop people from getting hurt?"

He gripped his brow and massaged deep pits into the already trench-like furrows, and he pivoted away from her and towards the wall that the single bed was pressed against. "Change…change…" He shook his head to himself. "Therapy isn't about change. I mean, what did you expect?" He batted one hand towards her. "That you'd come here secretary of state and leave a goddamn unicorn?"

She stared at him, deadpan, and bit down on the inside of her cheek whilst she waited for the words to settle. "Yes, you got me, Russell. It's always been my secret lifelong ambition to have a nervous breakdown and transform into a mythical creature."

With his hands clutching his hips beneath the open fronts of his suit jacket, he stood facing the wall for a long moment and shook his head to himself again, his bottom lip trapped between his teeth. It looked like he was spewing out silent curse words to be absorbed into the off-white paintwork.

When his frown had eased, and it no longer looked as though he wanted to yell those curse words at her, he took a deep breath that rolled through his chest, and then sighed it out and turned to her. "Look, you don't go into therapy to change. You go into therapy to get the tools you need to help you cope, then you go out into the world, pretty much the same person you were before, but a little better equipped to deal with all the crap that you have to deal with day after day, and hopefully better able to recognise when you're at risk of falling apart."

Two days ago, she would have been happy with that. But now, if not changing meant that the next time something happened to Will she'd once again put him first and fail to reach out when she was struggling; if not changing meant that she'd pass the point of being able to reach out and end up hurting her family; if not changing meant that Will would no longer be around her and she'd lose part of the thing she called her home…

Her throat tightened, and she shook her head. "I don't know if that's good enough."

"Then you're going to be sorely disappointed." Russell fixed her with a firm stare. His eyes were cold and flint-like. "I told you before that avoiding the issue's not going to help you, and I'm telling you now that avoiding going home's not going to help you either. You need to get back to the real world before it moves on without you, and before you become well and truly institutionalised."

"I just want to take a few days—"

His voice soared again. "You've already had more than a few weeks. Geez, Bess—" He ran one hand over his scalp and shook his head at the ceiling. The words came with a bitter huff of a laugh that left him sounding breathless. "—it's been nearly two months."

"There are still some things I need to talk about."

"Then perhaps you shouldn't have wasted so much time when you first got here, deluding yourself into thinking you were all right and that it was perfectly normal to want to kill yourself."

A sting of shame blossomed in her chest; it felt like a black rose unfurling to reveal a heart of thorns. She retreated into silence, and her fingernails curled into the wood of the dressing table. She tried to summon anger at him instead; but at best, it eluded her, like trying to weave together wisps of red smoke that dispersed at her touch; and at worst, as those wisps spiralled away from her, they amassed of their own accord and contorted into a serpentine form, ready to strike back at her.

Russell continued to rant. "Here I am worrying that you're going to make another escape attempt just so that you can be with your family on Stevie's birthday, yet it comes around—the big…however-the-hell old she is—you've been told you can leave, you have your job back, I have a helicopter literally waiting to whisk you away from here and take you home—" He thrust his hand towards the window behind her. "—and you won't even step outside the goddamn door."

The sting only grew, now laced with the gut-tug of guilt. Despite all her work overseas in the CIA and at State, there had only been two birthdays she'd missed, (or two that she recalled): Stevie's eighth, when she'd somehow survived the car bomb in Iraq, and Alison's sixteenth, when she'd somehow survived the coup in Iran. To miss one now, all because she'd let herself fall apart, felt shameful in comparison. Russell was right: if she'd dealt with the issue in the first place, she wouldn't be at the clinic now. But something inside her told her that Will was right too: if she didn't deal with her need to put him first, she could find herself in the same situation again. She wanted to be there for Stevie; she wanted to hug her into embarrassment until Stevie squirmed and practically prised her off; she wanted to sing 'Happy Birthday' and not care that she was ridiculously out of tune because that kind of thing didn't matter when you were surrounded by the people who loved and accepted you, the people who made home what it was. But also she didn't want to ruin that home for them, by not at least trying to resolve what Will claimed to be her underlying issue.

You can't always have both things that you want. And though she'd rather climb into that helicopter, fly away from the clinic and towards her happily-ever-after, where within two hours she would find herself wrapped in Henry's arms, inhaling his real scent rather than resorting to breathing in his tee, and peppering her children with kisses until they groaned at her to get off and wished she hadn't come home after all, she knew what she needed to do.

She folded her arms across her chest and met Russell with a hard look, not quite the look she reserved for foreign leaders when she was telling them that what they were discussing was non-negotiable, but close enough. "This is my choice, Russell. You said before that you weren't going to let Conrad reinstate me until you were sure this wouldn't happen again, and you've already said that you're giving me the weekend anyway, so what harm will it do for me to spend it here and make sure that I'm sure too?"

"The harm is that it won't just be the weekend."

She fought to stop herself from averting her gaze, but it felt like staring into flames. Not because of the intensity of his look, but because of that desire burning inside her to agree to go home. "If I need longer, then I'll take longer. Conrad said I can have all the time that I need."

"Within reason."

"And if I tell him I want to be sure I'm ready before returning to work, I know he'll understand." She pushed herself away from the edge of the dressing table, brushed past him, and padded across the carpet towards her bag. The nylon fibres bristled beneath her bare soles, though not half as much as Russell's gaze did at the back of her neck as it followed her across the room.

"You're seriously going to go there? You're going to use the brain tumour?" He sounded half incredulous, half impressed by her gall.

She dumped the bag on top of her bed. It cratered into the plump duvet. With her hands on her hips, she turned to face him and gave a stilted shrug. "I will if I have to."

He stared at her for a long moment, his expression a wide-eyed neutral. It looked as though he were trying to ascertain how much truth was held in that, or perhaps he was just waiting for her to cave.

In the silence, the trickle of the rain running down the window filtered through the room, the soothing sound the perfect juxtaposition to the tension in the air.

A moment more, and then he gave a huff, derisive, and shook his head to himself. "Well, I guess it's up to you." He strode towards the door and grasped hold of the handle. "But if you're looking for some kind of catharsis, I think you'll find that belongs strictly in the realm of Greek tragedy—" He wrenched open the door with a rush as the bottom edge of the oak dragged in an arc across the carpet. "—and we all know how they pan out."

_Seriously? Greek tragedy?_ She arched her eyebrows at him as he stalked out into the yellow glow of the strip-lit corridor and nearly took out another one of the patients who happened to have the misfortune of walking past at that precise moment. "Goodbye, Russell," she called after him. The tap of his footsteps against the linoleum echoed and faded. "I'll see you on Monday."

"Yeah, well, we'll see about that." His shout rippled back.

There came a whoosh as he wrenched open the stairwell door at the end of the hallway, and the pang of regret hit her before the door had swung shut and stopped rattling against its frame. The silence that followed yawned until its jaws were wide enough to swallow her whole, its depth all the more consuming due to the fact that once again she found herself alone. Lonely, too. Achingly so.

She tried to smother the feeling. It didn't work. Something told her she had made the right decision, but it didn't stop her mind from tracing the opposite path, the one where she would have spent the helicopter ride swapping barbed comments with Russell, before catching up with Conrad at the White House, maybe stopping by to see her staff at State, and then finally returning home and being reunited with her family. That something also told her that she had to let that path go, before it drove her to distraction.

She busied herself with unzipping her bag and lifting out the clothes and toiletries one by one to place on top of the duvet whilst she waited for the whir of the helicopter blades to kick in and the shudder of the window glass that would follow. At the bottom of the bag, with its glossy orange cardboard now crushed in on itself so that it was flattened at one end, was the box of ginger snaps that Conrad had brought her. She lifted it out and prised apart the top. The waft of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon hit her. It soothed like the trickle of the rain in the background. She stuffed her hand inside and pulled out the scrunched up foil packet. Inside, there were four biscuits. One for each day, assuming that she did in fact return to work on Monday.

Russell had suggested she was looking for catharsis. She didn't know what exactly she was seeking or what it would look like if she ever found it. Change felt as vague as the image of herself had been in the water-streaked window, and just as intangible; something that few people ever truly touched upon and even fewer were able to embrace. She didn't believe in God, not anymore, but she did believe in signs. (Or at least, she believed in signs the same way that she believed in horoscopes: she'd listen to them, so long as they said what she wanted to hear, or so long as they justified her choices or made a difficult decision for her.) Four biscuits. Four days. She could allow herself that. _One step at a time_. The journey wasn't over yet.

* * *

**Henry**

**7:46 PM**

"…Happy birthday to yooooouuuu!"

Stevie sat at the head of the kitchen table, with Henry, Alison and Jason gathered around. She had pressed the backs of her hands to her cheeks, either to conceal or cool the blush that crept through them, but when the singing stopped, she scooped her hair into one hand and held it over her left shoulder, then leant forward with lips pursed and blew out the six by four grid of white and gold glitter striped candles that jutted from the stiff swirls of chocolate frosting.

"Remember to make a wish." Alison beamed at her sister.

Stevie worked her way up and down the columns. The flames flickered and swayed and sizzled out, and as the wisps of white smoke curled into the air and threaded together, the distinctive scent of blown-out birthday candles lilted through the room.

"And can you try not to spray it?" Jason's nose wrinkled. He dragged out one of the chairs in front of the shelves, and then slumped down into the seat.

"Afraid you'll get cooties?" Alison shot him a look as she pulled out the chair on the opposite side. She reached for the side plates stacked in the middle of the table, along with the cake slicer.

"No." Jason frowned at her. His look said—_Don't be stupid._ "I don't want to get strep."

Stevie gave him an incredulous look. "What? And obviously I have strep."

He shrugged. "Well, you're not exactly fussy who you share your saliva with."

Stevie stared at him. "Oh. My God."

"Hey, hey, that's enough." Henry made a tamping motion. Thank God he'd given them a cake slicer rather than a kitchen knife.

The house phone trilled.

He glanced across the kitchen, towards where the phone sat in its cradle at the far end next to the coffee maker, lit by the cool white glow of the recessed lights. "Can the three of you try not to insult—or kill—each other for just one minute?"

Stevie pivoted around, her eyebrows arched at Henry. "He basically just called me a slut."

"Well, if the thigh-high boots fit." Jason smirked and folded his arms across his chest.

She spun back to him. "Shut up." Whilst Alison grabbed one of the candles—the wick still smouldering—and lobbed it at him. He recoiled, his eyes screwed shut, and he rocked back into the shelves whilst his hands leapt up to shield his face.

Henry shook his head to himself and strode away through the kitchen. His reflection flashed past in the blackened window above the sink. This was about the point where Elizabeth would accuse him of being the one who wanted to go for three—not that he could recall her complaining at the time. He snatched the phone from the cradle, frowned at the caller ID, and then raised it to his ear. "Hello…?"

He turned and watched the kids as they plucked the rest of the candles from the cake and dumped them in a pick-up sticks pile atop one of the paper napkins, licking the pads of their forefingers and thumbs clean from smears of chocolate frosting as they went.

"Hello, Henry."

His frown deepened. He peeled the phone away from his face, stared at it for a moment, and then pressed it tentatively back to his ear. "Maureen…?"

"Well, don't sound so shocked. Anyone would think you'd never used a telephone before."

His mouth opened and closed, and he rubbed the furrows of his brow. "I'm just surprised to hear from you, that's all." _Given what happened last time we spoke…_

"What? You didn't think I'd call on my own niece's birthday?" Her voice was as quick and as sharp as ever. "How are you, brother?"

"Um…good. Yourself?"

"Oh, can't complain. And the kids?"

"The kids are well." He rested his hand against the countertop and leant his hip into the jut of the marble. At the table, Alison pointed the cake slicer at Jason in an accusatory fashion whilst Jason scowled and beckoned for her to hand it over. "Growing up far too fast."

"Save that for once they've moved out and started filing tax returns."

He chuckled.

There was a long silence. Tension simmered like static down the line. He half thought the call had dropped off, when— "And how's Elizabeth?" She tried to make the question sound casual, but the words came a touch too forced and a touch too bright, as though she'd been rehearsing the phrase and building herself up to saying it for the past week.

"Elizabeth? She's…uh…she's okay." It felt like the simplest response, and given that his mind had momentarily stalled, he wasn't certain if he was capable of forming anything more complex right then anyway. "Thank you for asking."

"Yes, well, good, I hope she's feeling like herself again soon and let her know that I've been thinking of her, won't you?" The words came in a rush, very matter-of-fact. She took a breath. It sounded like relief. "Right, now, pass me over so I can wish my niece a happy birthday."

"Um…sure." He cradled the phone in the palm of his hand and frowned down at it as he paced towards the kitchen table. That felt strangely like a peace offering. He wasn't sure if he should feel surprised or touched that she had asked about Elizabeth.

He extended the phone to Stevie, and when she looked up at him with a puzzled pinch in her brow, he mouthed, '_Aunt Maureen_.'

'_What? Why?_' Stevie mouthed back.

Henry gave a shrug and pressed the phone towards her.

Stevie stared at it as though it might bite her, and then with a smile so forced it could have been painted on, she lifted the phone to her ear. "Hey, Aunt Maureen…"

Henry squeezed Alison's shoulder on the way past, and then sank down into the seat next to her, whilst Stevie worked her way through a bingo sheet of polite conversational phrases, her smile growing ever more strained by the second. Jason tipped a slab of chocolate cake from the slicer onto one of the white ceramic plates with a wet slap, and then spun it across the table towards Alison.

But Alison had turned away. Her elbow was propped against the table, her hand tucked into the end of her jumper sleeve and half shielding her mouth as she murmured, "Why hasn't Mom called?" The whites of her eyes were wide, even more so with the thick black rim of eyeliner.

"She's probably just busy, Noodle." Henry gave her a taut smile to conceal the fact that he'd been hoping that Elizabeth might phone all day, all the while recalling how small and sad and pained she'd looked when he'd seen her through the window of the clinic on Monday. _Had she even remembered?_ His stomach sagged at the thought, but he forced his smile wider. "Plus, calling us when she can't be here might make her feel lonely."

He caught the plate that Jason slung towards him before it could skid over the edge of the tabletop between him and Alison, and then reached across to the cluster of forks in the middle of the table. He grabbed two, and passed one to Alison. He ignored the fifth one as it goaded him.

Alison looked about as convinced by his words as he was, and the pinch in her brow clung to her like a shadow. At least she hadn't rolled her eyes at him, though he wouldn't have blamed her if she had. Instead, she took the fork and raked it over her slab of cake. Crumbs skittered down the wedge and tumbled onto the ceramic.

"Uh…wait a sec, Aunt Maureen," Stevie said, "…there's someone else on the line…"

Jason, Alison and Henry all turned to Stevie as she held the phone away from her with a heavy frown and jabbed one of the buttons—_Bleep_. She raised it to her ear again. "Hello…?"

Although he'd already resigned himself to the fact that it wouldn't be Elizabeth, Henry found that his breath had stilled for a moment anyway.

"…Sure…"

At Stevie's tone, the flicker of hope faded.

"…thanks." Stevie cradled the mouthpiece to her chest and looked across to Henry. "Dad, security say someone's at the door."

Henry placed his fork down next to the plate. "Did they say who?"

Stevie shook her head. She continued to look at him, expectant, as did Alison and Jason. Or perhaps that wasn't expectance that gleamed in their eyes, but hope and fear of hoping.

He pushed his chair back from the table, the feet screeching against the floorboards, and as he squeezed through the gap between the chairs, he gripped Alison's shoulder again. All three gazes followed him like chilled drawing pins pressed to the nape of his neck as he strode away through the kitchen. When he reached the shadows that drifted through the dining room, he called over his shoulder, "Don't leave your aunt on hold."

"Oh crap…" The phone bleeped. "Hey, Aunt Maureen. Sorry about that… Yeah… I know…"

A hazy half-silhouette loitered behind the gauze curtain that stretched in rucks across the inner door of the porch. Henry's reflection coursed alongside him as he strode past the mirror that hung above the console table in the hallway, and then it disappeared from the corner of his eye. He grasped the handle and tugged open the door, the bronze a burning chill against his palm. A blast of bitter air tumbled in; it hit him in time with the thought—

"Hello, Henry."

—_Wrong Adams_.

"Hey, Will." His own smile almost took him by surprise. "They didn't say it was you." He stepped back and pulled the door wider. The cold air rolled in now and unfurled into the hall.

Outside, two agents stood beneath the simmer of cool yellow light that rained down from the lantern above the porch, one on either side of the outer door, whilst a group of four or five others rotated guarding the end of the paved path that led up to the house with wandering back and forth along the street between the two nearest lampposts—they migrated from one pool of amber light to the next and through the gradient of blackness in between.

Will twisted around and shot the agents a look. "Funny, given that they must have demanded to see my ID at least half a dozen times."

The agents on the door bristled, turned their chins towards their shoulders, and sent Will a sideways glance.

Will waited, almost inviting them to comment. When they kept to their silence, he faced Henry again. He held up a shiny dark blue carrier bag with a box of some sort stuffed inside. "I just wanted to drop this off for Stevie."

"Sure, come in." Henry jerked his head towards the back of the house. "The kids'll be glad to see you, and there's beer in the refrigerator, if you want. Plus, we have enough cake to feed a small army."

But Will didn't move. He glanced past Henry; his gaze lingered for a long moment before it drifted back to meet Henry's eye. "Actually…I wasn't planning on staying."

"Well, just come in and say 'hi'." Henry motioned again.

When seconds had spun out and still Will stood on the black and white tiles of the porch, Henry's smile faded a fraction and then turned almost as bitter as the chill in the air. He massaged his brow and then clutched his hip. "Look, Stevie was hoping her mother would be here today…" He shrugged. "Well, we all were. So even if you stop by for just five, ten minutes, it would mean a lot to them…to me."

Will paused. His eyes narrowed slightly. "I see." He glanced past Henry again, a little less tentatively this time. Then the nick in his brow evened out, and his expression warmed. "Well, in that case, I guess I could stay for a while."

Henry's smile returned. "Great."

Will held the bag out in front of him and let it lead the way as he stepped inside. He stood next to the console table, his back to the mirror, and waited for Henry.

"I appreciate you taking the time to go see Elizabeth." Henry guided the door towards its frame. "I know that worrying about her doesn't exactly bring out the best in—"

But before he could finish that thought and before the door could click into its frame, someone called along the path, the voice amplified to a shout by the night. "Dr McCord."

Henry stopped. He eased the door open again.

Matt, Elizabeth's DS agent, jogged towards the house, his breath escaping in puffs of fog that sailed up into the darkness. The fronts of his black woollen overcoat were open and they flapped with each stride. He slowed when he neared the path, and nodded to his colleagues and the Secret Service agents as he passed. When he reached the porch, he dipped his hand into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a slip of paper—a sheet of A5 folded in half, and then half again—and with it wedged between two gloved fingers, he held it out to Henry. "For Miss McCord." He leant backwards and glanced around as though suspicious that someone might be watching him. Then he gave Henry a stern look. "But it didn't come from me, and I was never here. Okay?"

"Okay…" Henry frowned, and somewhat warily, he took the slip of paper from him. "Thanks, Matt."

The frown lingered on as Matt pivoted on his heel and strode away into the night. _Do I even want to ask what that was about?_

But Matt had already disappeared down the street, and then when one of the agents outside pulled the outer door closed, Henry took that as his cue to do the same.

Will led the way through the living room, past the faded plum couch, the mahogany-edged armchairs and the somewhat sombre Christmas tree that lurked in the corner—its branches still bare except for the miniature bauble lights that hid amidst the needles, the bulbs unlit—and then into the shadows that swathed the dining room and towards the kitchen where the smell of blown-out birthday candles teased the air. He unroped his black and white checked scarf as he went.

Henry followed a pace behind. His gaze clung to Will's neck. "So…how is she?"

Will glanced over his shoulder as he stepped into the glow that flooded the kitchen. His brow furrowed. "Who…? Lizzie?"

Henry gave him a look—_Yes, Elizabeth. Who else?_

Will stopped at the near end of the kitchen island, his back to Henry. He bunched up his scarf in one hand and dumped it atop the marble surface. Then he paused, his fingers still buried in the bundle of fabric. "She's where she needs to be."

Silence suspended the air around Henry. It felt as though the words were silt kicked up from a riverbed, and they hung in a murky cloud, refusing to thin or settle.

Will walked away, towards the kitchen table. His voice lifted. "My favourite niblings!"

"Uncle Will!" With a screech of chairs jerking over the floorboards, Alison and Jason abandoned their slices of cakes and scrambled up from their seats. Alison hugged Will, wrapping her arms tight around him, her face alight as she beamed over his shoulder. Then Jason jostled for a hug too, his expression just as bright. Even Stevie, perhaps a touch reluctant after the Dr Owens revelation, let Will pull her into an embrace as he wished her a happy birthday.

"Here, I got you this." Will held out the carrier bag to Stevie. "Just a little something."

Stevie set the bag down on top of the table, next to the discarded house phone and her plate with its picked-over wedge of chocolate cake. Alison and Jason had taken their seats again, and they watched their sister as she pulled out the box. The bag fluttered down to the floor, forgotten. Stevie turned the box over so that the top faced up, though the answer was emblazoned across the sides—bright red text clashed with the lurid yellow background: 'Operation'. The board game.

Will smirked. "I thought it was appropriate seeing as how you've shown such an enthusiasm for medicine recently."

Stevie glowered at him. "Ha. Ha. Very funny."

"What?" Jason looked between the two of them. "I don't get it."

Will pulled up the chair next to Alison, the one where Henry had been sat before. "Inside joke." He slumped down into the seat, snatched up the untouched plate of cake and then leant back against the curve of the wooden top rail. He balanced the plate in one palm and held it towards his chest as he scooped a forkful of crumbed frosting to his mouth.

Jason's frown deepened. His gaze continued to flit between Stevie and Will. "But why's it funny?"

"It's not." Stevie sank down into her own seat at the head of the table. She ran her fingernail along the gap between the lid of the box and its base, cutting through the shrink wrap, and then she tore away the plastic and stuffed it into the bag on the floor.

"You know," Will spoke through a mouthful, "I was the 'Operation' champion at med school. We used to have competitions all the time. I don't think I lost a single game."

Stevie froze midway through lifting the lid off the box, and she cocked an eyebrow at Will. "Oh really?"

"What? Don't believe me?"

The inevitable descent into the challenge of a contest and the resultant trash talk that could only come with an Adams-McCord board game battle faded into the background as Henry's gaze drifted down to the folded-up slip of paper clutched in his hand. He fingered the edge of the note. _For Miss McCord_. So Elizabeth had remembered after all, and had roped Matt into delivering the note, and had probably broken all kinds of protocol in the process.

Or at least that was his assumption. Because that's what Elizabeth would normally do: no matter what restrictions were placed on her, she would find a way to get through. But the thought refused to align with the image of her looking small and sad and pained through the window of the clinic, and the words Will had said—_She's where she needs to be._—that stained his mind.

The note was meant for Stevie, and he should have handed it to her without hesitation. Not only because she'd be pleased to hear from her mother—as would Alison and Jason—but because that was the right thing to do when it came to privacy and respect. After all, there was a big difference between keeping an eye on an eleven-year-old's Facebook posts or texts—_We spy because we love._—and reading the note he'd been trusted to pass on to his now twenty-four-year-old daughter.

Yet he found himself fumbling it open anyway. And he was glad that he had and he wished that he hadn't.

The flow of Elizabeth's cursive handwriting stared up at him from the page. Black ballpoint ink over unruled white. Faint ridged lines interrupted it. Imprints. The ghosts of scratched out sentences from overlying sheets.

_Dear Stevie, Happy birthday. I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you. I hope you had a lovely day. Missing you lots, Mom xxxx_

That was it.

The words were simple, the sentences stilted. No mention of Alison or Jason or himself. No mention of how she was doing or when she would be coming back to them. No clue of anything. No comfort. Just a nod to their current stasis. If it weren't for the fact that it was written in Elizabeth's handwriting, he wouldn't be sure that she had been the one to pen it. Perhaps when he'd opened the note he'd been hoping to hear her voice flow through the words, the way that it did when he read her speeches; and perhaps he'd been hoping to hear that voice say that she was feeling like herself again, and through the strength of that voice, he would know it; and perhaps then the image of her looking small and sad and pained would fade away. But the note gave him nothing. No voice. No character. No comfort. Only silence emanated from it.

_She's where she needs to be_. The echo swept in to replace it.

He folded up the note again. "Stevie?"

A buzzer went off, and all three kids laughed at their uncle whilst he protested that someone had jogged the table.

Stevie turned to her father. Her eyes were bright, her smile wide. "Yeah?"

He fingered the edge of the note, and tilted his head towards the refrigerator, where the blur of his reflection gleamed back at him. "I'm getting a beer. Do you want one?"

"Sure." Her smile warmed him like sunlight.

Then she returned to the bubble of laughter that surrounded Alison and Jason. Jason stooped over the table, his elbows propped against it whilst he tried to suppress his snorts and giggles so that he could lift the piece out of Cavity Sam without faltering. He raised up the Broken Heart piece, pinched between the tweezers, and Stevie and Alison cheered him on before then jeering at Will. "And you call yourself a trauma surgeon?"

Will swivelled around in his seat. "Henry, come help me out here. Your children are cheating."

At the sight of the four of them, Henry found himself chuckling—the lightness at the opposite end of the kitchen was catching. He wished that the note could have brought the kids comfort, but knowing that it wouldn't and that it would only dredge up more worries, he was glad that he had been the one to read it. Elizabeth must have meant well, but she had trusted him to take care of their children, and as they laughed and smiled with their uncle, for a moment forgetting the person who wasn't present, he knew that she would understand.

He fingered the edge of the note one more time, and then tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans.

Sometimes it was best to remain oblivious.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**

**Thoughts are appreciated.**


	76. Chapter Seventy-Four: the letter 'e'

**Chapter Seventy-Four**

**…****the letter 'e'.**

**Elizabeth**

**Saturday, 15th December, 2018**

**9:24 AM**

"…Maybe this is just who I am. Maybe I can't change. And you know what? Maybe I don't need to." Elizabeth continued to pace back and forth behind the leather couch in the therapy room; the carpet fibres burnt her bare soles, whilst her hands flailed of their own accord. "I mean, is it really such a bad thing for me to want to think about others? … Seriously?"

When her cardigan slipped down from her shoulders, she halted, wrestled off the layer of chunky-knit wool as frenziedly as she would were it a rabid koala bear about to bite her throat, and turned to Dr Sherman, who had been watching her in an impassive silence from the safety of the armchair, much like one might watch a game of _Pong_. "People put other people first. That's just what they do." She shook her arm and yanked it out of the sleeve, turning the sleeve inside out and possibly earning herself a friction burn in the process. "Will's probably saying all this crap just to justify the fact that he's so self-centred."

She flung the cardigan over the back of the couch and sent it skidding in a heap towards the front edge of the cushion, where it teetered in a moment of _will-it-won't-it?_ existentialism whilst she clutched her hips and her chest heaved over each breath in a way that made her ribs pinch and ache. "I mean, he's a textbook narcissist, for crying out loud. To him, altruism is practically a four-letter word. God forbid he should think about anybody other than himself."

The cardigan slid over the edge of the cushion and pooled onto the strip of carpet between the couch and the coffee table.

Dr Sherman's gaze drifted down to the cardigan, lingered there for several seconds, each one long enough to last a lifetime, and then drifted back up to Elizabeth. She waited, perhaps wanting to make sure that Elizabeth had definitely finished her rant this time around and wasn't about to launch into it afresh as soon as she'd caught her breath or another train of thought steamed through her.

Elizabeth waited too. She tugged at the front of her t-shirt, just below the neckline; the cotton billowed and created pockets of air that fanned her sweat-prickled skin. The radiators in the therapy room pumped out their stale heat and left the air parched, and the silence hung just as relentless.

With her biro clasped between both hands atop the navy blue notebook in her lap, the capped end jutting upwards, Dr Sherman leant forward in her seat. Her mouth hung open for a second or two, one last opportunity for Elizabeth's rant to resume, before she spoke—her words measured. "The issue here isn't that you wanted to help your brother, it's that you put his needs before your own, to the detriment of your mental and physical health."

Elizabeth swept one hand towards the window. She'd already wrenched the blind down after the black walnut tree had leered at her from across the car park. "So, if a mother sees that her child's about to get hit by a car and she runs into harm's way to save said child, is that inherently wrong?"

"I think that's more a matter of instinct rather than a conscious choice." Dr Sherman continued to stare up at Elizabeth whilst she let the words settle. "In our session with your brother the other day, you suggested that you knew that you were struggling, but rather than reaching out either to your husband or to me directly, you decided to hide the fact so that you'd be able to stay at the hospital and look after your brother. That doesn't strike me as instinct."

"Well, it feels like instinct to me," Elizabeth muttered. She rounded the end of the couch and slumped down onto the cushions. The leather sagged around her, and as it did, it felt like it sapped the last of her energy and left her muscles drained. She let her head rest back against the top of the couch and she stared up at the whitewashed expanse of ceiling.

"What makes you say that?"

She shook her head. Her hair ruffled around her. "I don't know. It just feels—" She gestured to her heart, or maybe her stomach…something internal at least. "—like I need to put him first."

"And why do you think that is?"

But if she had the answer to that, then they wouldn't have spent however long going around and around in these incessant circles and she would be home already by now. Maybe Russell was right. Maybe she was looking for something that didn't exist. Maybe there was no change to be found, no catharsis.

The ceiling stared down at her, vast in its blankness.

"We all have reasons for behaving in the ways that we do. Sometimes it's useful to understand those reasons so that we can break the pattern at the source, sometimes it's enough just to recognise the behaviour and change it from there." Dr Sherman paused. Elizabeth's mind filled in the vague non-judgmentally encouraging hand gestures that staring up at the ceiling hid from her. "You've recognised that you have this need to put your brother first, and so long as you acknowledge that—"

"It's not enough."

Another pause. Elizabeth's mind filled in the suppressed simmer of irritation in Dr Sherman's expression, or perhaps Dr Sherman didn't bother to suppress it when her clients chose to stare up at the ceiling rather than facing her. "Then tell me, what makes you feel like you need to put your brother first?"

_Because we haven't gone over this question, like, a million times already…_

A tiny black bug, like a freshly inked hyphen, crawled across the white paint wilderness. It seemed to have more sense of direction than their conversations had over the past few days. What was worse, it felt like Dr Sherman had a satphone with Google Maps but was insisting that Elizabeth lead them using the motion of the stars. During daylight. With heavy cloud cover. This was why she hated therapy. Why did therapists feel the need to ask questions when they had already come up with their own answer?

"Your brother's younger than you."

"Is that a question or a statement?" Elizabeth's voice dragged.

The bug disappeared beneath the circular mirrored panel of the light fixture.

"It's an observation."

Elizabeth lifted her head, her fists pitted into the cushion on either side of her, and she narrowed her eyes on Dr Sherman. Dr Sherman wore a sweet-as-Pixy-Stix smile. It wouldn't have irked Elizabeth half as much had she slept more than six hours over the last three nights combined. And the lack of sleep wouldn't have irked her half as much did it not point to the fact that Will was right—her brain was wired to worry. Especially about him.

Dr Sherman broke the tension with a small shrug, her hands still folded atop the notebook in her lap, her biro clasped between them. "How do you think that affects your relationship dynamic?"

Elizabeth shook her head, shook aside the comment. "Henry has younger siblings, but I don't see him feeling the need to put them first." She eased herself forward in her seat to retrieve the cup of coffee that waited for her on the glass-topped table. Licks of steam wreathed into the air.

"What if Henry had lost his parents at fifteen? Do you think him being older would have made him feel like he needed to protect his younger siblings then?"

Elizabeth stopped. Her hand froze mid-air. Something cold and unwelcome oozed from the pit of her stomach. It numbed her senses, yet left her heartbeat twice as heavy; the thud slammed off her ribs and filled her ears.

Dr Sherman gave that shrug again. Far too neutral, far too nonchalant. "If you want to understand why you act the way that you do, then I think it's important that we consider what impact your parents' deaths has had on your life."

Elizabeth shrank back in her seat, the coffee forgotten. She rid her palms of their slick of sweat by smoothing them down her jeans. The denim rasped against her skin. Maybe she didn't need to change. Russell was right: she had her piece of paper, she should just go home.

"What was it like growing up without your parents?"

She folded her arms across her chest. Her stare stiffened into a glare as she held Dr Sherman's gaze. Why did people always have to go there? Why did they feel the need to treat her like she was broken just because she was an orphan? People die. Parents die. It didn't define her, and it certainly wasn't the root of all her problems. Only…

She had promised them that she'd look after Will—or at least she'd promised the memory of them, at some point between the haze that exploded from the pinprick of news and the moment the handfuls of dirt hit and scattered over their caskets. That soil had clung beneath her fingernails for days. Every time she'd raised her fingers to her lips, Aunt Joan's voice circled through her mind, '_You'll get worms_', and she couldn't help but think of the worms that would invade the caskets and then her parents' bodies. It turned her stomach every time.

A hint of that nausea swirled at the pit of her stomach now, as subtle as the licks of steam that curled up into the air from the surface of her coffee. Her gaze softened and drifted away towards the cream-coloured blind that muted the window. What was it like growing up without her parents?

There were as many ways to go with that as there were moods that stained a person's day; the analogies as countless as they were inadequate. It was like trying to explain the mouthwatering fragrance of Japanese honeysuckle or the narcotic scent of night blooming jasmine that drench the streets as the sun succumbs to dusk and as the prickling heat of the day surrenders to a blanket of soft warmth to someone born without the sense of smell. That's why it was easier with Will. They didn't need words or explanations or analogies. Just silence. The void said it all.

Elizabeth's gaze flitted back to Dr Sherman. She let her arms fall away from her chest, and then slid her palms down the rough denim of her jeans and clutched her knees. She drew in a deep breath and held it there. Her gaze dipped to the front edge of the coffee table; yellow light rippled waves across the carpet beneath. "There's this book by Georges Perec, _La Disparition_. It's a lipogram. It's written entirely without the letter 'e'… Some people see the book as a game, but it's not." She shook her head to herself; her hair trembled against her neck and jaw. "It represents something far deeper."

She paused, and then looked up at Dr Sherman. "The constraint imposed by not using the letter 'e' means that the absence creates a presence—" Her voice sharpened whilst her hand cut the air for emphasis. "—the fact that even the most common of words can't be used draws attention to what isn't there. The absence becomes a thing in itself." Her fingers spiked.

Silence.

A moment later, her hand fell back to her knee. Her gaze followed, and her voice softened. "It's all the more poignant when you know that the author lost his parents when he was still a child. In the original French, without the letter 'e', he couldn't use the words 'mère', 'père', 'sœur', 'frère', 'oncle', 'tante', 'famille'. He couldn't even write his own name." Her throat tightened and caught as she swallowed. "So it's not a game. It's a book about loss. It's about the hole that's left behind. And the absence of the letter 'e' draws attention to that hole…or void."

She stared down through the coffee table as she continued, Dr Sherman's gaze an ever-present prickle as she watched from the armchair opposite. "That book means something to me. It feels like my life in a way, especially when I was younger. No matter what I did, I was always confronted by what wasn't there. At school, other kids worried about parents' evening, or how they were going to hide their newly acquired smoking habit over the holidays; I didn't have those worries—and it wasn't because I didn't partake in puffing Virginia Slims out of the dorm window, or that I always got straight As. At college, other students moaned about how embarrassing it was to be seen with their parents when they were striving for that first step of independence; meanwhile, I was lugging my suitcases across the quad on my own and spending 'Family Weekend' alone in the library. Normal couples debate whose family they're going to spend the holidays with and they trade off Thanksgiving and Christmas; not me and Henry. No worries, no embarrassment, no debates…? The absence of those things just reminded me of an even greater absence. My parents."

She paused whilst the words floated down like scraps of a shipwreck towards the seabed. "It's always there, hidden in things. Becoming a mother reminded me that I didn't have my own mother. Thanksgiving meals with Henry's family reminded me that I'd normally eat Chinese takeaway with Will in front of the TV. I couldn't even get my wisdom teeth taken out until after I'd met Henry, because I needed a general anaesthetic and I didn't have anyone to look after me. Then I'm pretty sure I almost lost him when after five days of nothing but canned broth, yoghurt and fruit juice, I practically begged him to blend up a cheeseburger pizza or liquidise a piece of steak just so that I could have some real food to eat."

She shook her head to herself. That certainly wasn't the first nor the last time that Henry had stared at her with that look of mild panic that seemed to ask what on earth he had gotten himself into. It said something that he'd stayed.

When the thought had dissipated, she looked up at Dr Sherman. "Life assumes that you have your parents with you, and when you don't…" Her shoulders rose as the sentence trailed away. _What was it like growing up without your parents?_ "I guess it makes me feel less than whole. After all—" Her lips tweaked at one side. "—you can't write 'Elizabeth' without the letter 'e'."

The hush that followed felt like the moment just after she had finished a speech, when she wasn't sure how it would be received. Only, in the therapy room, there was no Daisy there to field questions, no applause to reassure her, no Blake nor security to rush her away.

"Do you and your brother talk about the loss of your parents?" Dr Sherman met her with the same neutral expression as before. Her hands were still folded atop the notebook in her lap, her elbows propped against and pitting into the leather armrests of the chair.

Elizabeth considered that for a moment. Her gaze drifted away towards the artificial ficus tree in the corner of the room. "Not really. I mean, sometimes. But not properly." She gave a flinch of the shoulders. "I guess we talk around it, rather than about it."

"And do you think that not talking about it could be another form of constraint?"

She shook her head. "It's not a pleasant subject."

"I can understand that. But your parents' deaths shaped you and your relationship with your brother." Dr Sherman gave a shrug. Far too neutral, far too nonchalant. "Perhaps talking about it would provide you with the clarity that you need."

* * *

**10:11 AM**

Elizabeth turned her back on Amy, who sat in the office chair behind the desk and pretended not to be listening whilst she stared at the computer screen—though the reflection in the lenses of her glasses revealed nothing but the plain blue background of the monitor.

_You'd think she could at least open up Spider Solitaire or something…_

Elizabeth leant back against the front edge of the desk, and the oak cut into the top of her thighs. She cradled the phone to her ear, the white plastic already beginning to sweat against her cheek as the dial tone rang out and out and out. The second to last ginger biscuit was clutched in her hand, and she fumbled over its rough edges until it began to sweat too. Sticky crumbs clung to her fingertips before they dislodged and tumbled to the carpet.

Still the dial tone rang out and out and—

"Hello?"

"Hey." The word escaped her in a breath, and her fingers stilled against the ginger snap. "It's me."

Silence.

If it weren't for the breaths that ruffled down the line, she would have thought he'd hung up already.

She closed her eyes, and then wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder, and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Look… You weren't wrong when you said that I should have looked after myself rather than focusing on you—"

"I think the term you're looking for is 'obsessing', and if that's your idea of an apology—"

Her eyes snapped open. "It's not an apology, _Will_. And if you're not going to apologise for being in a coma, then I'm not going to apologise for finding you the treatment that stopped you from spending the rest of your life in said coma."

Amy's gaze prickled at the back of her neck.

_God, what did she have to do to get a little privacy?_

She massaged her brow, but the tension remained. "Look…" She fought off a wince. "You're important to me, and I'm trying here because I don't want to lose you and I don't want anyone to get hurt because of me…but I need your help."

Silence.

She braced herself for the quip. Something along the lines of the 'Great Elizabeth McCord' or the 'Perfect Lizzie Adams' deigning to ask for his help and how honoured he should be. Or perhaps something more cutting, a slash to the bone reserved for their more bitter of confrontations.

It didn't come. Instead— "And how, exactly, do you propose that I help you?"

She switched the phone to the opposite ear, and stared at the ginger snap that disintegrated between her fingers. Granules tumbled down. Sticky crumbs of time. "Just come back and talk with me."

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	77. Chapter Seventy-Five: Andrei Kostov

**Chapter Seventy-Five**

**…****Andrei Kostov.**

**Conrad**

**10:59 AM**

The arc of pale yellow light that had flooded through from the hallway and into the Situation Room tapered in an ever-narrowing wedge as the door dragged across the carpet and swung shut behind Conrad; it thinned to a chink and then disappeared altogether when the door juddered into the frame. Conrad's eyes took a moment to adjust to the twilight of the room—the blue gloom was softened by the glow cast from the screen mounted on the wall at the far end. A chill hung like static in the air compared to the warmth that thawed the corridors outside.

"Tell me what's happening."

Russell stood near the head of the desk. The red displays of the digital clocks glared behind him. "We've just had word from Moscow." He pivoted to face Conrad, his hands rested against his hips, his fingers splayed. The jeans and indigo plaid shirt that he wore nodded to the fact that he—and the others in the room—had been called in at the weekend. "Apparently they've found a way to get our friend Volkov to talk. My guess is it didn't involve tickets to the Bolshoi."

Conrad stepped up behind his chair and laid his hands atop the backrest. His fingertips curled into the leather cushion as he stared past the men sat on either side of the desk and he frowned at the images that jostled across the screen. "What do we know?"

Ephraim Ware twisted to face Conrad. His forearms rested against the edge of the desk, his fingers steepled in front of him. Gleams of white light reflected in the lenses of his glasses. "Our agents in country are reporting widespread arrests of members of the group we believe to behind the attacks on Secretary McCord, and reports suggest that a number of high level GRU officials have been detained, including those we've identified as having ties to the group."

"So, Volkov gave them up?"

Ephraim nodded. "It looks that way, sir."

"Makes you wonder what, exactly, they did to him—" Russell spoke in a mutter. He slung one arm across his chest, his hand wedged in the crook of his elbow, and he tugged at his chin. "—given he must know what'll happen when his associates find out that he snitched on them."

But given what the group had done to Elizabeth and what they still might have planned, they deserved whatever they got—and worse.

Conrad's gaze flitted from Ephraim to Director Haymond to Director Doherty. "And what about people operating on US soil? Do we have names?"

"We've been assured that Kostov's the last of them," Russell said. "Minister Avdonin gave me his word, for whatever that's worth."

Conrad turned to face him. His eyebrows raised. "And he's definitely still within US borders?"

"According to Volkov, he's right here in DC." Russell nodded towards the screen.

The footage from a body camera showed the beige-yellow bricks of an apartment block that towered up on the opposite side of the street. Curtains and blinds covered most of the windows, whilst bath towels and t-shirts hung over the steel railings of the inset balconies. A cloud blue sedan sailed past and momentarily obscured the view of the glass doors that opened onto the foyer.

Conrad's grip on the chair tightened. He didn't know whether he should feel relieved that Kostov was within touching distance and they could finally put this whole episode behind them, or angry that the man who'd poisoned Bess had been under their noses the whole time.

Director Doherty looked up at Conrad. "Sir, my agents are ready to make the raid."

Conrad kept his gaze locked on the screen. His scowl deepened. "Do it." It was wrong that a man could inflict so much damage yet not face the death penalty. "And tell your men they have permission to take him by any means."

Doherty picked up the headset from the desk, slipped it on, and relayed the command through the mouthpiece. A moment later, the agent whose footage was displayed on the screen gave the affirmative, and at his hand signal, a stream of men and women in bulletproof vests and dark blue jackets with 'FBI' emblazoned in yellow across the back flooded towards the entrance of the building, their pistols unholstered and raised. Jackets flapped, heads bobbed, ponytails swayed; whilst passersby froze and gawped, and a fawn chihuahua yapped and strained against its leash.

The footage shook across the screen as the agents ran across the street, into the foyer with its slate grey mailboxes that covered the left-hand wall, and up the stairwell where gobs of gum clung to the steps and flyers fluttered against the smudge-daubed plaster. Conrad's heart pounded as though he—not the agents—were the one sprinting up the steps, taking them two at a time.

When the agents reached the ninth floor, they slowed and spread out along the hallway. They pressed their backs to the wall, their pistols clutched in front of their chests. A pause. The fluorescent strip light above flickered, and then it juddered and cut out. In one of the apartments, a baby wailed. Conrad's pulse quickened further still as the agents edged towards a door near the middle of the hallway; it had chipped green paint and the number 'ninety-seven' affixed in brass numerals. The lead agent motioned towards the door with a swift tap of the fore- and middle fingers of his left hand, and one of the heavier-built men stepped forward. The roar of, 'FBI', had barely left his lips before he raised his foot and stomped down the door.

The door swung wide and slammed into the wall behind. The agent stepped back, and his colleagues surged in around him; they shoved the door aside as it bounced back towards its frame.

More shouts of, 'FBI, FBI, FBI', echoed through the sound system and thickened the silence that suspended the Situation Room.

Russell eased a step closer to the desk. Beneath his breath, he muttered, "Come on, come on, come on."

The agents continued to swarm inside, their guns poised.

Conrad's pulse thrummed through him, and his fingernails dug into the leather backrest of the chair. No one would be able to scramble out of a window and jump from that height, or attempt to swing down from balcony to balcony. Surely?

"What's taking so long?" Russell scowled at Doherty, and he flung a gesture towards the screen. "You've got enough men in there to subdue a goddamn football team."

The footage jostled as the lead agent scurried after the last of his colleagues towards the doorway. The wood of the door had splintered and cracked where the first agent had kicked it in.

Doherty pressed two fingers to the earpiece and turned away from Russell. "Agent Healey, I need an update. Have you apprehended the suspect? … I repeat. What's the suspect's status?"

But Agent Healey's reply garbled and the screen fizzled and cut to black.

Russell tossed his hands up, and then clutched the air and pivoted away from the screen. His fists clung to the sides of his neck, and the tendons there corded.

"Agent Healey, I need an update." Doherty raised his voice whilst he continued to stare at the blacked out footage. "Have you apprehended the suspect?"

Flecks of white skittered across the screen.

Conrad's jaw tensed. They had to have caught Kostov. The intel was fresh. He had no one to warn him and no one to assist him. There were too many men there for him to escape.

"Agent Healey? Do you read me?"

Silence.

The audio whined with static.

Then came the first shout— 'Clear.'

Conrad's stomach sank.

A second— 'Clear.'

Russell bowed his head and massaged his brow.

A third— 'Clear.'

The footage crackled onto the screen. The team of FBI agents mulled through the empty apartment, their guns returned to their holsters. They looked lost, like children trying to figure their way out of a playpen. Tipped over takeaway cartons lay atop the small wooden table wedged into the corner of the room, a couple of faux fur beanbags were stacked against the wall, and above that a cork board with white pushpins that trapped the tags from pieces of paper that had been ripped down. The camera lowered as Agent Healey crouched, and then, as he reached forward and slipped his hand into the gap between the wall and the beanbags, straggles of the beige faux fur obscured the camera lens. When he drew back, he had an ID badge pinned between forefinger and thumb of one hand.

The tradecraft was shoddy. Something anyone with an inkjet printer and a laminator could cobble together in half an hour or less. But sometimes that—along with the right outfit and an air of confidence that said, '_Yes, I'm meant to be here. Trust me._'—was all that it took to allow someone to walk the halls of a place without anyone giving him a second glance; to enable him to watch the comings and goings of the people who were meant to be there without drawing suspicion to himself; to grant him the authority to stride into a locker room, to open a locker that wasn't his, and to instal spyware onto the cell phone that belonged to the brother of the secretary of state.

The picture was of 'Andrei Kostov', though the name said 'Robert Smith'. The hospital the ID was for…?

Walter Reed.

A clench radiated through every last one of Conrad's muscle fibres until it felt as though the stubs of his fingernails might pierce the leather back of the chair he still clung to. He turned to the men sat in the Situation Room, who had now bowed their heads and found fascination in the surface of the desk. He stabbed one finger at the ID on screen. "Where the hell is he?"

* * *

**Henry**

**2:59 PM**

"Forensics are pulling the place apart as we speak, but so far all they've got to go on are a bunch of old takeaway cartons, a neighbour who insists Kostov was a quiet and considerate young man, and a do-it-yourself ID. It looks like he cleared out days ago." Russell was hunched forward on the dusky plum couch in the living room. He kept throwing off gestures as he spoke; each thrust or flap of the hand seemed designed to release some of the irritation that roiled beneath his skin. "We know he no longer has any support in the US after Volkov was recalled by the Kremlin, and he has no way of knowing what's currently happening to his pals in Moscow, so our best guess is that he's lying low somewhere until he can find a way to escape back to Mother Russia or to wherever the hell else will take him. Who knows? Maybe he'll decide to become Bulgarian after all."

Sat in one of the armchairs opposite, Henry massaged his brow. The deluge of information over the past half hour or more was enough to make his head ache almost as much as last-minute cramming for finals had back at college. It wasn't just the situation itself that bothered him—as comforting as it was to know that Elizabeth's would-be killer had been living just a few kilometres away—but also the fact that the current onslaught of information could easily have been avoided if only Russell and Conrad had kept him updated on the investigation as it unfolded, rather than dumping everything on him now. Though, in order to do that, Russell would have had to admit that Elizabeth was the one giving the FBI all of their leads.

His hand fell to his lap. His gaze flitted from Russell to Conrad and back again. "Look, I really don't care where he goes. Bulgaria, Russia, Timbuktu—" He batted a hand towards the front door. "So long as he stays the hell away from my wife."

Conrad leant back in the corner of the couch, one leg slung over the other, his elbow pitting into the armrest. With his face cradled in the crook between forefinger and thumb, he rubbed the middle joint of his second finger against his cheek. All the while, his gaze remained heavy on Henry. It felt like he was trying to get a read on him. "I understand your frustration, Henry—"

Henry huffed. "Oh, sure you do."

Conrad raised his voice. "—and I know it can't undo what's happened or the stress it's placed on you and your family, but we're not going to let him get away. Not again."

"As I said, I really don't care. If the Russians are cooperating like you say they are, then let him run back to Moscow, let them take care of him."

Conrad shook his head. "We can't risk him slipping away to a different country."

Russell looked up at Henry over the rims of his glasses. "It's not what Elizabeth would want either. She's invested a lot in capturing Kostov. We can't just sit back and do nothing."

Henry pursed his lips and bit down on the inside of his cheek as he resisted the urge to point out that capturing Kostov wasn't what Elizabeth was meant to be investing her time and effort in; or that the FBI shouldn't be depending on her to do their jobs for them and that perhaps she wouldn't feel the need to get so wrapped up in the investigation if they hadn't all but blamed her for them not having any leads; or that if the security agencies had kept her safe in the first place then they wouldn't find themselves in this situation now.

Russell looked to Conrad, and when Conrad met his gaze with a barely perceptible nod, he returned to Henry. "We've stepped up security at all the ports, and Acting Secretary Cushing has reached out to Mexican and Canadian officials to secure their cooperation too, but we need to put the pressure on Kostov to get him to make a move while we're ready and waiting for him."

Henry's frown deepened. "Pressure…? What kind of 'pressure'?"

In the pause, the roar of tyres on tarmac as a car sailed by outside crescendoed and faded, whilst the discordant hum of three different songs drifted down from the kids' bedrooms.

"It's my intention to address the nation this evening."

Henry's gaze darted to Conrad.

Conrad leant forward in his seat, mirroring Russell's stance. The whites of his eyes widened as he looked across to Henry. "We're going to release the full details of the poisoning and the shooting, and tell the public about Kostov's involvement. Chances are, someone out there will've seen him and will be able to tip us off as to his location, or the pressure of having a whole country on the lookout for him will be enough to flush him out from wherever he's hiding."

Russell stared at Henry too. That same white-eyed look. Equally as disconcerting. "We wanted to let you know now. Give you the chance to read in your family before it's all over the media."

_Going public, reading in his family, the poisoning, the shooting, the people responsible having been right here in DC…_ The music from upstairs grew louder as it drew into focus; the thud of Henry's pulse formed the beat, whilst his thoughts whirred just below the surface of his mind._ The kids. How was he meant to tell the kids?_

His gaze flitted back and forth between Conrad and Russell. His mouth had dried. "What if I say no?"

Russell shook his head. "It's already been decided."

Henry stared at him.

Conrad and Russell stared back.

_So, that's all this was? A courtesy?_

His jaw tightened, and he lowered his voice to little more than a hiss. "You're asking me to tell my children that—despite promising them their mother was safe—someone went to the clinic and shot her three times in the chest, and that for the second time in as many months, she could have died."

Russell's brow crumpled, and he drew back, his hands held out to the sides. "She could die from a spider bite, or from tripping down a flight of stairs. Hell, she could get hit crossing the street…especially with the morons who insist on polluting the roads in DC. You can promise them whatever the hell you want, but there's no such thing as 'safe'."

The clench in Henry's jaw tightened. It forced him to bite out the words. "Thank you for the truism, Russell. I'm sure that'll be of such great comfort to them."

"You know what will comfort them?" Russell hunkered forward again, and he stabbed a finger in the vague direction of the front door and the world outside. "Knowing that the man who poisoned her and their uncle is behind bars rather than roaming loose through the States."

"Then perhaps you should have done more to catch him already."

"And perhaps we would have caught him already if your wife hadn't insisted on crying 'amnesia' for God knows how many weeks." Russell slung the words out. They expanded to fill the silence, whilst Russell's gaze bored into Henry. It goaded him, once again highlighting all that Russell had seen but that Henry had not. "This is all going to come out eventually anyway, thanks to the wonder that we call 'freedom of the press'. Might as well use it to our advantage and catch Kostov now before port security drift back into apathy and let him slip out of the country."

Henry held his gaze. "As I said, that's not my concern."

"Henry…" Conrad stared down at the patch of rug beyond the toes of his shoes, and he let the silence stretch. The _clink-clonk, clink-clonk, clink-clonk_ of the clock on the mantlepiece thickened the pause and sharpened the anticipation, as though each beat demanded to know what would come next. Then, in his own time, when there was no doubting who was in control of the conversation or that he was just using the pause to assert his authority—because that's what it came down to in politics: who could command the longest silence—he met Henry's eye. "It's time to put this to bed. We have an opportunity here, and we mean to take it. You want to protect your kids, I appreciate that, but the media's already starting to show interest after the raid today and I know that the last thing Bess would want is for Stevie, Alison and Jason to find out about this online or through the TV. Talk to them. For her sake as much as theirs. And we'll keep you updated on any progress."

Conrad paused for a moment, as though to invite a response that Henry felt sure neither Conrad nor Russell would welcome—after all, they hadn't come to ask his opinion or permission—and then Conrad braced himself against his thighs and pushed himself up from the seat.

Henry ought to have stood up too. That was the courteous thing to do. But courtesy had a sour taste at the moment. He understood what Stevie had meant when she'd said she wanted to be a part of something, not just have it happen to her. That's what life felt like at the moment—a series of things that happened to him. Each blow left him reeling, and just when he regained his footing and stepped out of his reactive stance, the next punch slammed into him.

Of course he didn't want to tell the kids that they'd been right to wake up with their midnight fears and a bad feeling that something had happened, only for him to attempt to mollify them whilst out there somewhere their mother had just been shot. And although he agreed that it was best that the kids hear it from him rather than from the news or Twitter or whatever it was they obsessed over these days, being forced to tell them now felt like just one more decision that had been wrested out of his control. It would have been different had Elizabeth been there to reassure them and to show them that she was all right. But she wasn't, and he didn't know if she was.

He could only hope that capturing Kostov would bring the kids closure, and perhaps that closure would help Elizabeth too and enable her to put this behind her, just like he hoped her seeing Will would. Maybe then he could be the father and husband that he wanted to be again, rather than the man struggling to stand on his own two feet.

He looked up at Conrad as Conrad picked up the navy blue golf jacket he'd folded over the back of the couch. "Do whatever you need to, just keep him away from my wife."

Conrad flashed him a taut smile. "You have my word, Henry; we'll keep Bess safe."

* * *

**7:01 PM**

_'__Good evening, my fellow Americans. On October twenty-fourth, an attempt was made on Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord's life. Both Secretary McCord and her brother were poisoned while dining together at a restaurant, and as a result of this poisoning, both she and her brother collapsed and shortly thereafter fell into comas…'_

With the lamps dimmed in the den and the black of night already pressing in through the net curtains, the light cast from the television flooded the walls with an eerie off-white glow. Henry sat on the couch with the kids, his arms slung around Stevie's and Jason's shoulders as they leant into him on either side, whilst Alison curled up at the far end. The smell of the cheese and tomato pizzas he'd ordered still clouded the air, though it was starting to fade now that they'd been left to congeal in their grease-stained boxes on the kitchen table. After learning about the shooting, and revisiting all those same fears again, the kids had barely even picked at their dinner. Henry had suggested missing Conrad's address, but the kids had insisted on watching. It felt like they were deliberately prodding a bruise. But maybe that's what they needed. Sometimes to feel pain was better than to feel fear of pain. Or maybe it was just a thirst for information, as though something that Conrad said might differ from what Henry had told them already, or maybe somehow they'd be able to read between the lines and find some new comfort, as though they could understand away their worries. And in any case, they wouldn't be able to avoid it when it was splashed across the news channels and social media feeds in a few minutes' time.

_'__With the ongoing threat, Secretary McCord has been advised to stay at a secure location, both for her own safety and for the safety of her family. While there, she has continued to supply support to the State Department and to the investigation…'_

Alison twisted around. The whites of her eyes were bright. "Has Mom really been working?"

Jason folded his arms across his chest; Henry could sense more than see his scowl as he remained tucked against his side. "They're probably just saying that to boost her approval rating."

Alison stared past her brother. "Dad…?"

Henry rubbed Stevie's and Jason's upper arms as though trying to muster the warmth that the taut smile he gave Alison lacked. "I don't know, Noodle."

It didn't seem worth saying that Elizabeth _had_ been in contact with her staff and that was what had put her in the position to be shot. And in truth, when it came to Elizabeth, the only thing he was sure of anymore was— "I don't know."

* * *

**'****Andrei Kostov'**

**7:13 PM**

'_I'm releasing this information today as part of an appeal for your assistance in capturing the man responsible for poisoning Secretary McCord and her brother, and who is linked to the group responsible for the shooting that took place on December fourth…_'

The man who went by the name 'Andrei Kostov' watched the Americans whilst they stared up at the boxy television that hung from the ceiling in the corner. The lights in the bar were dimmed and golden, and the glow from the screen lit the Americans' faces in shades of awe-struck white and grey whilst they drank in their president's words like they did the glasses of watered-down beer clutched in their podgy hands, pitifully unaware of the propaganda their so-called government placated them with.

He watched them whilst they stared up at his photograph on the screen, and a thrill rippled through his veins warmer than the buzz of alcohol. _If only they knew. If only they would open their eyes to the man perched on the barstool at the opposite end of the counter. Would they see?_

But 'Andrei Kostov' was clean-shaven with a 'Number 1' cut and a tattoo prominent on his wrist. Tonight he was Roman Sokolov, like 'sokol', the falcon.

Sokolov dipped his hand inside his bomber jacket and fumbled free the leather wallet he'd stuffed into the pocket. It was slimmer than he'd like it to be, though soon that wouldn't be a problem. He slipped out the last remaining ten dollar bill that the embassy man had left for him and tossed it onto the counter. Meanwhile, the Americans continued to stare up at the screen.

Sokolov strode across the car park and towards the motel on the opposite side where the lights formed a checkerboard of off and on. His footsteps scrunched through the gravel as he followed the hazy yellow path cast by the glow that escaped the bar behind him; as the door swung shut, the beam slimmed to a chink and then vanished.

The smell of coal smoke and exhaust fumes and the hint of frost tingled in his nose and lit his soul. He drew in a deep breath and savoured the crisp chill that burned through his lungs. It reminded him of home, in a way. It would be good to be back there again soon, with Stepan and his hats, with little Elena and her red ribbons and plastic ponies, and even with Ilya—though he still hadn't forgiven him for the drawing pins. Never would.

Yes, it would be good to be back there again soon.

Soon. But not yet.

He had one last stop to make in Virginia on the way.

* * *

**That brings us to the end of part five. **

**See you soon for the start of the sixth and final part. : )**


	78. Chapter Seventy-Six: the photograph

**Chapter Seventy-Six**

**…****the photograph.**

**Henry**

**Sunday, 16th December, 2018**

**10:30 AM**

Rain pounded the windows. Henry raised the mug to his lips and took a short slurp of the too-warm coffee whilst he fumbled at the bottom right-hand corner of the broadsheet spread out across the end of the kitchen island. When he finally managed to secure a grip, he turned the page and the swish of paper curled up into the room. With the heating on full blast and the rain pelting down, the glass behind the slats of the venetian blinds had fogged and the air had grown thick; it gave the downstairs a stuffy yet cosy feel.

Alison and Jason loitered at the opposite end of the kitchen island, near the pantry. Both stooped over the countertop, their elbows propped to the marble as they clutched their cell phones and stared at the white glow that emanated from the screens. The phones whooshed and clicked and chirped over the beat of the rain.

At the thud of footsteps charging down the stairs, their thumbs stilled and their heads pricked up. Henry's grip on the mug tightened and he swivelled around on the stool, just in time to catch a flash of Stevie storming past.

Half a second later, there came a crash against the kitchen table.

The cardboard box Stevie had been carrying had spilled atop the wooden surface, and a thousand matt and glossy images had flooded out.

Henry clunked the mug down on the counter. His brow furrowed. "Honey, what are you—"

"First she gets poisoned, then she gets shot, not once but three times—three times! Did you know bullets can penetrate a bulletproof vest, by the way?" Stevie kept her back to him whilst her whole body jittered with bound-up energy. "If something happens to her, I don't want to be learning about her from some tabloid journalist's idea of a biography or from a Wikipedia page."

"God… Looks like Stevie's finally lost it." Jason drawled from the opposite end of the kitchen. "Good thing Mom knows a place—Ow!"

"Don't say that about Mom." With the whine in Alison's voice, Henry didn't need to look at her to see the pinch that nicked the middle of her brow.

"What? I'm just saying…"

Henry shot Jason a look as he pushed himself up from the stool. "Respect your mother."

"Whatever." Jason shrugged it off, and he stuffed his cell phone into the back pocket of his jeans. "I'm going over to Jake's." He grabbed his bomber jacket from the peg, slung it over his forearm, and then motioned to Stevie. "Have fun with that."

Stevie scowled at Jason. "Doesn't it bother you at all that Mom could have died?"

"Why do you think I'm going to go numb myself with video games?"

Henry padded over to where Stevie stood in front the deluge of photographs that swarmed across the kitchen table. The lights above reflected off their surfaces in dapples of golden-white. He squeezed her shoulder. "I know that hearing what happened to Mom's scary, but she's okay."

"But what if she hadn't been? How am I meant to make the most of her if she's dead?"

Henry's mouth hinged open and then hung there. He searched the sea of photographs as though they might hold the answer—one that didn't point out that his daughter's current panic was entirely of his own doing. When he'd spoken to Stevie the other night, he hadn't intended for her to get so agitated. Then again, he hadn't intended to tell the kids about the shooting either. After all, what good could possibly come of upsetting them like that when Elizabeth was no more than bruised? (At least according to her staff.)

Then his gaze landed on the image that lay on top of the box lid, and he frowned.

He let go of Stevie's shoulder and stepped past her. He picked up the photograph by its corners, so as not to smear it with his fingerprints. "I remember this."

Stevie looked to him. She curled her fingers over the top rail of the chair. "You do?"

"Sure I do. I was the one who took it."

The photograph was of Elizabeth sat on the couch at Conrad's house with baby Stevie, maybe eight weeks old, lying lengthways in her lap, her tiny fists flailing at either side. Next to Elizabeth sat Lydia Dalton, with a seven-month-old Harrison perched in a precarious tripod between them. The two women had been chatting away, and Elizabeth had looked so at ease and so content—perhaps the most relaxed he'd seen her in weeks—that he knew he had to capture it. So he'd borrowed Conrad's camera and was about to take the candid shot, when Elizabeth looked up, and as she caught sight of him, the most brilliant smile flashed across her face.

He smiled down at the photograph now—of that moment of unadulterated joy preserved forever—and then turned to Stevie. "Where did you get it?"

"President Dalton gave it to me after that _incident_ with the VP."

"Dalton gave you what?" Alison nudged up next to Henry on the opposite side to Stevie, her arm bumping against his, and then she stole the photograph from him. "Wow. Is that Mom?"

Jason sailed past the three of them on his way to the back door, tugging his bomber jacket on as he went. "You know, nostalgia's just a symptom of your current dissatisfaction—"

But then he caught sight of the photograph too, did a double take, and stopped. His face lit up, and he snatched the photo from Alison and held it up next to Stevie. He dragged one finger from the image of Elizabeth to Stevie's face and back again. "Look, it's Mini-Me."

Stevie pursed her lips and tugged them to one side. "Aren't you meant to be liquifying your brain with video games?"

But Jason had ditched the photograph on top of the billowing tide of images and grabbed up another one: Stevie, once again, but this time maybe five or six years old and swamped in a frilly white tutu and a pair of tights a size too big that she was holding up with one hand to stop them from slipping down as she prepared for her ballet class's first performance—a take on 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy'. "Oh, this one needs to go up on Facebook."

Stevie's scowl deepened. "I wanted to find out stuff about Mom, not have you compile a load of embarrassing photos of me."

"I don't see why the two should be mutually exclusive." He sank down onto the chair at the head of the table and scooted it forward. The feet screeched against the floorboards. He reached across the table, rocked the chair onto its front legs, and plucked up another photograph, this time of a toddler—whom he must have presumed also to be Stevie—clinging to a fluffy white toy owl almost as big as she was in a koala-hug-cum-chokehold. He held it up for his sisters to see. "How about this one for your profile pic?"

Henry laughed, and squeezed his shoulder. "I'm afraid that one's you, buddy."

Jason frowned down at it. "What? No, it's not."

"That's when you were going through your 'owl phase'."

The girls each took a seat. They pored over the photographs, chatting to one another and pointing at the images as they picked out the ones of Elizabeth, and cringing each time an embarrassing shot of themselves popped up before they promptly tossed it into the cardboard box in the middle of the table.

Henry stood behind Jason's chair, one hand rested against the top rail. He chuckled to himself as he stared down at the photo of Jason and the toy owl.

_"__What on earth happened?" Henry stared open-mouthed at the scene in front of him._

_He had only stepped out of the dining room for two, maybe three, minutes to fetch the bottle of Merlot that he'd left to breathe on the kitchen side. But now both Stevie and Alison were hunched over the table and crying into their hands, whilst Jason was red-faced from bawling and he continued to scream, 'No owl! No owl! No owl!' And food was…well, everywhere. Splodges of gravy smeared the once-white tablecloth, clumps of mashed potato clung to the wall behind Stevie, and that _might_ have been a floret of broccoli that dangled from the light fitting._

_Elizabeth leant over the table and snatched the bottle of wine from his hand. She glugged the wine out into her glass. The red swirled up past the halfway mark and she showed no sign of stopping._

_"__Babe?" He stared at her._

_"__Well… Stevie told Jason that the turkey was an owl. Turns out, Jason didn't like the thought of that so much—hardly surprising seeing as his 'owl phase' looks like it's set to stay—so he decided to lob a fistful of mashed potato at Stevie, but it landed in Alison's hair instead." Elizabeth paused, and her gaze drifted to the wall behind Stevie before it returned to her glass, the wine still pouring. She shrugged. "Or at least the first batch did anyway. Alison didn't like that so much, so she threw a carrot back at Jason, but it landed in Stevie's gravy instead and splashed her favourite top…and everything else. And Stevie didn't like that so much, so now they're all crying."_

_"__I see." Henry studied her as she clunked the bottle of wine down, the glass now teeming to the brim. "And you're just…?"_

_She leant back in her chair and cradled the glass of wine in front of her chest. She stared into the distance. "Waiting for it to turn into Lord of the Flies, or for them to tire themselves out eventually."_

_Then she looked up at Henry, her gaze so sharp it whistled straight through him. "The next time you so much as think about impregnating me, I want you to remember this scene." She raised her glass to him, just as a floret of broccoli hurtled past his ear. "Happy Thanksgiving, Henry."_

With her chin propped to the heel of her palm, Alison looked up at Henry, her eyes bright beneath the lights. A photograph of him and Elizabeth taken during their days at UVA was half-hidden beneath her other hand. "How did you know that Mom was the one?"

Henry grinned. "Have you met your mother?"

Alison rolled her eyes. "Seriously, Dad." Then her expression softened. "How did you know she was your _forever_ forever?"

Henry let go of the back of Jason's chair and paced over to the kitchen island. "Well, it wasn't the moment I thought I couldn't live without her, that's for sure. Or the moment I realised that this was it, this was forever. That's about the time I freaked out." He picked up his mug of coffee from the countertop. When he turned to face the table, he found all three kids looking up at him. Stevie and Alison had twisted around in their seats, and even Jason had stopped scavenging through the photographs that his sisters had discarded in the cardboard box and was staring up at him expectantly.

Henry perched against the stool and cradled the mug to his chest, close enough that the warmth pressed through his shirt. He stared past the kids, towards the shelves against the far wall. A slight frown dawned across his brow. "I think the moment that I truly knew she was the one—my _forever_ forever—was when I realised that I _could_ live without her, but that there was nothing at all in the world that would make me want to."

Stevie propped her elbow against the top rail of her chair and rested her chin to the back of her hand. "Was Mom mad with you after you left her?"

"I didn't_ leave_ her. And she married me, didn't she?"

"How did you propose?" Alison asked.

"Skywriter." Henry took a sip of coffee. "And no matter what she says, it was romantic."

Jason gave him an incredulous look, one that said—_You've got to be kidding_. "A skywriter?"

"What? I was going to be a fighter pilot. It was my way of showing her that whenever I was up there in the sky, I'd be thinking about her and about coming back to her."

"I think it's romantic," Alison said.

Jason turned his look on her now. "That's because you've internalised the ideals of romance perpetuated by Hollywood movies."

Henry nearly choked on a swallow of coffee. "Uh, excuse me. Need I bring up Luther Vandross and chocolate-covered strawberries?"

Jason's cheeks flushed a violent crimson. He sank back in his chair, and folded his arms across his chest.

Stevie adjusted the frames of her glasses whilst she continued to stare up at Henry. "How did you and Mom first meet?"

A soft smile sprang to Henry's lips, and his gaze dipped to the floorboards. He drew in a deep breath, his eyebrows raised. "Well—"

The front door slammed.

Henry stopped. He twisted around. Rain thundered against the windowpanes like shards of steel being driven through the glass, and the sound of footsteps stomped and echoed through the hallway. His heart hammered just as loud, and he stumbled down from the stool. A surge of adrenaline had severed the connection between his brain and his legs, but somehow he managed to find his footing. He clunked the mug down against the countertop before he could lose his grip, and then backed up towards the kids and motioned for them to stay in their seats.

"What's happening?" Jason said. A spark of fear lit his tone.

"It's okay. Just stay there." Henry motioned again. _Where the hell were security?_

The footsteps grew louder.

DS and Secret Service agents guarded every inch of the house; they patrolled up and down the street. There were always at least two on each entrance. They were armed. They wouldn't hesitate to shoot if there was a threat. No one could get past them, surely.

"Henry?"

At the voice, a wash of relief swept through Henry—_Thank God_. He pinched the bridge of his nose and drew in a sharp breath. It quivered in his chest. When he opened his eyes, he glowered at the shadow that strode through the gloom of the dining room, a taller figure chasing just a pace behind. "This is our home, Russell. You can't just barge in here unannounced."

Russell held up one hand to stop that thought as he marched through to the kitchen. "Let's save the nuances of social etiquette for another time, shall we?" He came to a stop in line with the sink, and Agent Hayes halted behind him. Both men wore black overcoats. The wool of their coats and the lenses of their glasses were beaded with pellets of rain. "I need your car keys."

Henry's frown stretched into bemusement.

Russell flapped his fingers towards his palm. "Now."

"Why?"

Russell held his hands out wide and rocked back on his heels. "Because I fancy taking it out for a spin, and Agent Hayes here thought he'd join me." The sarcasm came heavy.

Henry's jaw tightened. "You know, you'd get what you wanted a lot faster if you'd just explain what's going on rather than barging in here and making demands."

"I'd get what I wanted a lot faster if people would just do as I asked when I asked rather than wasting time questioning everything."

"Dr McCord." Agent Hayes pulled a wad of folded up pages free from his inside jacket pocket. The edges were dampened and semi-translucent from the rain. "After the raid yesterday, we did a routine check for any credit cards linked to the address. That turned up nothing. But then someone in my team thought to contact the takeaway shop that Andrei Kostov had been ordering from to see if they had any record of payment details for orders delivered to that address. It turns out that he paid over the phone using a credit card not associated with that address—possibly provided by someone working with him, it's not yet clear. We pulled all the records for the card going back to August, when he first arrived in the country—" He smoothed the stapled-together pieces of paper down atop the newspaper spread across the kitchen island, and pointed to a line highlighted in fluorescent yellow. Henry eased a step closer and frowned down at the entry, whilst Agent Hayes twisted around to look up at him. "—and we found a payment to a company who primarily deal in GPS tracking systems. The payment went through on November thirteenth, after it was announced the secretary was taking personal leave—"

Henry turned to Russell. "You think he put a tracker on my car?"

"It's a possibility we'd like to rule out." Russell held his hand out again. He flapped his fingers to his palm. "Car keys. Now, please."

Henry's mind raced. He had driven to the clinic on Monday. He had wanted to see her, to get Russell to leave her alone, to make sure she was okay. But if there was a tracker on his car, that would mean…

He shook his head. Adamant. "He can't have. The car park at the War College is secure, and DS would've noticed if someone was trying to get into the garage."

Russell balked. "What? Like they noticed someone taking pictures of your house?"

Henry clenched his jaw, and shook his head again. "You told me he's on the run, that he's trying to get out of the country."

"And he might well be." Russell's voice strained. He stooped forward and counted off the place names on his fingers. "So far, we've got simultaneous sightings of him in Wichita, Palm Springs, and Paradox—ironically." He tossed his hand up. Then his gaze steeled on Henry. "But if he knows where she is, we need to do something. Sooner rather than later. So grab your car keys."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	79. Chapter Seventy-Seven: the ones they

**Chapter Seventy-Seven**

**…****the ones they avoided talking about.**

**Elizabeth**

**10:59 AM**

Spittles of rain streaked the glass. Elizabeth's breath fogged against the window of the therapy room and added to the haze of condensation that already misted over the scene of the car park. Outside, Will's steel blue hatchback had pulled into one of the bays at the far end—nearest the track that wound through the slender white pillars of the paper birches—and as the door clunked shut and the sound echoed up into the air, the crows that had been roosting in the bare boughs of the black walnut tree launched themselves into flight with a stream of throaty _caw, caw, caws_ that jarred against the soft scrunch of Will's footsteps.

Elizabeth turned her back on the window, and as she ambled past the armchair where Dr Sherman sat (possibly steeling herself for the session ahead—if she wasn't, she probably ought to be) and towards the leather couch, she peeled off her chunky-knit cardigan. The radiators churned out their unwavering heat, and it left the air dense and fuggy. A slight sweat tingled on her skin. Though, of course, that had nothing at all to do with the jangle of nerves that made her insides feel like red Play-Doh being squeezed through that 'Fun Factory' Jason had loved as a kid. After all, Will had agreed to come back, hadn't he? That had to be a good sign.

She chucked the cardigan over the arm of the couch, and then sank down onto the cushion. It slumped around her. She waited in silence. Licks of steam wreathed up from the mug of coffee that sat atop the glass table, and thinned into the air. It must have been her third or fourth cup of the morning, (the refill at breakfast didn't count), and with her blood caffeine level at around fifty-three per cent, the aroma had turned from a welcome warmth to just plain nauseating. Next to the mug, the last ginger snap sat on a folded up wad of blue-green paper towel. The sugar crystals that encrusted its golden surface glistened beneath the lights.

At the clunk and swoosh of the door, the thump of her heart surged to a canter. Each beat pounded against her bruised ribs. She twisted around and rose up from the seat—more out of instinct than conscious choice—and she smoothed her palms down the length of her jeans, ridding them of their ragged film of sweat.

Will stepped inside. Once again, he wore his khakis, that green-grey jacket that needed either washing or incinerating, and his black and white checked scarf. Once again, he turned and watched Amy out of the corner of one eye as she guided the door shut behind him. Once again, he faced Elizabeth and eyed her as though they were standing on the opposite sides of a chasm. But this time, from the way his presence bristled, Elizabeth got the sense that there would be no hug.

Her fingers fumbled at her sides, and she offered him a tentative smile. "Hey."

"Hey." He nodded in reply. He held her eye for a moment—a blue granite stare—and then his gaze dipped away from hers and it traced the carpet ahead as he strolled towards the couch and unroped his scarf. He dumped the scarf in a snaked coil on top the arm of the couch, and then shucked off his jacket too. He gave Dr Sherman a tense smile and nod by way of greeting.

"So… Thank you for coming back." Elizabeth lowered herself onto the opposite end of the couch. She gripped her knees so as to still her hands.

"I was surprised to hear that you decided to stay." He sank down onto the cushions, raked his fingers through his rain-dewed hair, and leant back into the corner of the couch. He rested one arm along the armrest, the other along the back. "Stevie had a good birthday, by the way."

"Oh good." She fought to keep her smile in place, but it strained. She should have been there with them, rather than smuggling them a note that she must have rewritten ten or eleven times before she decided it was probably best to go with something bland and inoffensive, along with a kiss for each of them. Her gaze lowered to her knees, and she shook her head. The ends of her hair wisped around the angle of her jaw. "I wanted to be there, but I thought a lot about what you said—"

"About your obsession."

She scowled at him. "About my perfectly reasonable worry that one day something might happen to you." Then the scowl eased away, and her gaze drifted until the black walnut tree lurked at the edge of her vision. "…which might have gotten a little out of hand."

She paused for a moment, and then returned to Will and slid one hand across the cushion that stretched between them. The leather was cool and rough beneath the heel of her palm. "You're important to me. Henry and the kids are important to me. And I want to figure this out."

"There's nothing to figure out." His fingers flared atop the back of couch. "Just stop putting me first."

She retreated, and folded her arms across her chest. "It's not that simple, _Will_."

"Sure it is. Rather than obsessing your way to a breakdown—" He flapped one hand towards her, as though she were the epitome of a nervous wreck. "—try prioritising yourself."

"Said the narcissist."

"That's not narcissism, Lizzie. That's fitting your own oxygen mask first."

He stared at her long into the pause. Blue granite now touched with frost. It felt as though he were daring her to dispute that. She wished she could.

In the background, the patter of the rain against the glass crescendoed to a thrum. The streaks coursed down the window; they weaved in and out of one another, tributaries that coalesced and diverged like a network of blood vessels coloured by the black walnut tree that stood in the centre of the car park beyond.

"Look, if you brought me here just to argue your case as to why you think—"

She turned to him, the movement sharp. "I want to talk about Mom and Dad."

His gaze flitted over her, his lips still parted. With the flash of shock, the frost in his eyes thawed, and it left him as exposed as he had been as a boy of thirteen, before they had both learnt how to shield themselves.

He shrank back further into the corner of the couch, whilst the wall of iced granite rose up once again. "What about Mom and Dad?"

With her hands clasped atop the notebook in her lap, Dr Sherman leant forward in the armchair as though to wedge her presence between Elizabeth and Will. "Elizabeth is struggling to understand why it is that she relates to you in the way that she does—" Her hair swayed against the collar of her charcoal cardigan as she shook her head, and her hands grappled over nothing as though to emphasise the vagueness of the feeling she described. "—this feeling she has that she needs to put you first." She stilled. "So we thought it might be useful—"

Will's gaze narrowed on Elizabeth. "So you thought you'd blame Mom and Dad?"

Elizabeth's eyes bugged. "I'm not blaming Mom and Dad."

"No, just saying that they're the reason why you are the way that you are."

"What?" She drew her chin back, still hugging her chest and pressing on the bruises that billowed across her ribs. "So what happened to them has nothing at all to do with you becoming a doctor? And not just any doctor, but a trauma surgeon who deals with life-threatening injuries, like, oh I don't know, people who've been in a car crash—"

"I want to help people." His tone sharpened, and his look cut through her. "A foreign concept, I'm sure, for someone who spends half her time nuking the planet for a living and the other half ordering drone strikes."

"Okay, that is so _not_ my job."

"And yet you do it anyway. Or maybe that's just your idea of fun."

"And now you're just deflecting because you don't want to talk about Mom and Dad." A white thread straggled across her knee. She plucked it from the denim and let it flutter to the carpet.

"That's what we do." His gaze prickled over her. "I'd say it's served us pretty well so far."

"Has it?" She looked up at him.

The words stretched and thinned into silence.

The thrumming of rain pressed in and thickened the hush between them.

"You're the one who's been going on about me needing to change. All I want is for us to talk about what happened."

"What's there to talk about?"

"Mom and Dad died, Will."

"You think I don't know that?" His brow folded into a frown. "I was there. I saw them."

"And I wasn't, and I didn't." Her voice cracked. "And I would have given anything—_anything_—to protect you from that." She held her hand to the side of her head. Her fingers clawed as she motioned to the whirring paths of what-ifs that, for thirty-five years, had played out on loop inside. "I've gone through a million different scenarios, a million different times, thought about how if I'd altered just one link in the chain, things could have turned out different." She thrust her hand towards him. "What if I'd decided to come with you and delayed you by a minute? What if I hadn't asked for that extra math assignment a couple of days before so I wouldn't have had an excuse to stay at home? What if I'd put an extra tub of ice cream in the cart when I went to the store with Mom?"

She let the thought hang.

Then her hand fell back to her lap, her fingers collapsed around emptiness, and the chasm in her chest yawned a little wider. It sent out the ripple of an ache that went deeper than her pulse. "We could have all sat together on the porch swing and eaten ice cream from the freezer, and you never would have gone out for milkshakes."

Will stared back at her. The same paths reflected in his eyes—the ones they avoided talking about. It felt too cruel to believe that had so much as one innocuous decision been different, it could have stopped things from aligning in the way that they did.

But that was life: a series of events, seemingly unconnected, the true interaction of which could only be appreciated through hindsight.

He lowered his gaze, and shook his head. His fingers opened and closed in a fist atop the back of the couch. "I don't know what you're looking for—"

"I'm just trying to understand—"

His gaze shot up, as did his voice. "—but talking about Mom and Dad won't help."

"You don't know that."

"This is your issue, Lizzie."

"I just want to talk."

"And I don't." His tone cut her down as sharp as a slap. "Do you honestly think I want to be reminded of that? Do you honestly think I don't think about it enough already? One minute we're driving along perfectly fine, getting the daily sermon on how 'gifted' Lizzie is—" He swept a hand towards her whilst his scowl deepened. "—the next minute the car's hurtling off the road and we're rolling upside down. Dad's dead. Mom's barely alive. And there's nothing I can do except stand by the side of the road and pray to something that doesn't even exist that someone will show up and help."

If his eyes were granite, pain was embedded in each fleck, and beneath the veins of anger, torrents of hurt swarmed.

She swallowed, her throat tight, and she fought to hold his gaze as she slid her hand towards him, as much to comfort him as to tether herself as the chasm walls groaned further and further apart. "Will… I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry." He pushed himself up from the couch so sharply that she recoiled. "Just sort yourself out." He grabbed his jacket and scarf from the armrest, and then marched towards the door.

"Hey, Will." She surged up from her seat too. Her heartbeat thundered to a gallop. "You don't get to tell me you're going to cut me out of your life and then refuse to help."

He wrenched open the door with a grating swoosh, and shot her a glare over his shoulder. "And you don't get to pull a Freud and blame everything on Mom and Dad."

Her eyes widened, and exasperation stained her tone. "I'm not blaming…"

But the door had already swung shut.

She flung a backhanded sweep in its direction. "Oh, that's it. Just walk out. Real mature, Will."

* * *

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	80. Chapter Seventy-Eight: credit card tr

**Note:** If you find the story boring, that's okay. I know it's not for everyone. But please can you keep your comments constructive, so that I have the chance to take on your feedback and improve. Please remember to be kind too. Thank you!

* * *

**Chapter Seventy-Eight**

**…****credit card transactions.**

**Henry**

**11:03 AM**

The fug of radiator heat and worry hit Henry the moment he stepped inside the back door. Stevie and Alison had been sat at the kitchen table, but as Henry entered, they pushed themselves up from their seats so sharply that the chairs let out a grating screech as the feet dragged over the floorboards. Though the photographs still sprawled across the table like a wave spilling against the sand—a thousand smiling faces that beamed up at them and basked in the glow of the lights overhead—the mood in the room had darkened and it sparked with anxious energy. Both girls looked to Henry with pinches in their brows. Then their gazes darted to Russell and Agent Hayes as they stepped inside as well and stamped the rainwater from their shoes. The damp from the rain thickened the air further still.

Stevie wrapped her fingers around the top rail of the chair. Her knuckles formed white peaks through her skin. "So? Was there a tracker? Is Mom safe?"

Agent Hayes's cell phone trilled. He excused himself, bustled past Henry and Russell where they stood behind the couch, and strode away towards the dining room.

The girls' gazes followed him until the squeaking tread of his footsteps had faded, and then they returned to Henry.

Henry gave them a shaky smile. "It's okay, the car's clean."

"Really?" Stevie's fingers wrung the wood. "You're certain?"

"Positive." Henry nodded.

"No tracker?"

"No tracker." His smile widened. "False alarm."

Their shoulders slumped with relief and their bodies collapsed in on themselves, as though the threads of tension that had been holding them up had been cut in a single swoop.

Henry opened his arms to them and motioned for them to come closer, and as they neared, he pulled them into his embrace. He clung to them and let his eyes slip shut. For the first moment since Agent Hayes had mentioned the GPS device, he felt like he could breathe. Truly breathe. His car was clean. Kostov didn't know where Elizabeth was. She was safe. Their family was safe. Everything would be okay.

"Good," Jason said. "Because either this guy is really into cleaning and DIY, or he was planning on building a bomb."

Henry's breath stopped. His arms fell away from around the girls, and as the girls stepped to the sides and turned to face their brother where he perched on the stool at the end of the kitchen island, the list of credit card transactions that Agent Hayes had dumped on top of the newspaper now clutched in his hands, he frowned. _He didn't just say…did he?_

"What?" The word tripped from Henry's tongue at the same time as it did from Russell's.

Jason pursed his lips and shrugged whilst the rumour of a blush crept through his cheeks. He lowered his gaze to the top sheet of paper, dragged his finger down the page, and shook his head to himself as he did. "There are all these records for different DIY stores, here, here, here, here—" He folded over the page with a crisp swish that cut through the drumming of the rain. "—and then there's the chemical company that supplies the science lab at school, and the industrial cleaning company that Trent's dad works for, and I'm pretty sure that's an electrical hardware store. If you were interested in making a bomb, you'd have everything you could possibly need." He looked up again, and when he was met with Henry's and Russell's horrified stares, his blush deepened and he gave another shrug. Slightly more stilted this time. "What…? I saw some stuff online when I was looking at those forums with all those people who want to kill Mom."

The silence bristled like a cloud of charged particles had diffused through the air. It sparked against the rumbling of the rain.

Henry and Russell continued to stare at Jason in mild horror, as did Alison and Stevie.

Under their gazes, Jason shrank back on the stool until he bumped against the jut of the kitchen island, and the paper crumpled as his clutch tightened.

Russell pivoted to Henry. His eyes bugged, and he thrust one finger at Jason. "Either you seriously need to upgrade your firewall, or you need to block his VPN. Kids are meant to watch pornography, for crying out loud, not look up how to build their own bomb."

"I'm sorry. That's your concern here?" Henry frowned. "The man who belongs to a group that wants to kill my wife and who's currently God knows where running loose in the US might have access to a homemade bomb, and you're worried about my son's browser history?"

"What concerns me is that your thirteen-year-old might just have more analytical capability than all the bureau agents combined, and the fact that—if he's right—this is a total snafu waiting to happen." Russell turned away from Henry and shook his head to himself. His voice lowered to a mutter. "If the press get so much as one whiff of this…" He dug his cell phone out of the pocket of his overcoat and paced towards the kitchen table. "I'll need to put out an alert, update the agencies, make sure they know not to approach him. The last thing we need is for a trigger-happy cop to provoke a Russian citizen into setting off a bomb on US soil."

Jason looked between Henry and Russell. "But it's going to be okay, right?" He had lowered the printout to his lap and his fingers fumbled over the rain-dampened edges. "Because Dad's car was clean. So even if the guy has a bomb, he doesn't know where Mom is…right?"

In the lull, the thrumming of the rain against the windows and doors expanded into the room. It thickened the air and the silence.

A prickle like the ice cold shards splintering into the glass spread out from the pit of Henry's stomach. His car was clean, DS's cars were clean, Russell's car was clean, but what about…

It felt like his stomach had been pierced by one of those shards. His gaze darted to Russell. "Did you check her brother's car?"

Russell kept his back to Henry, his shoulders hunched whilst his thumbs darted over the keypad of his cell phone. Beads of rain still clung to his overcoat. "What?"

"The GPS tracker? Did you check her brother's car?"

"Why would we check his car?"

_Oh God._ The energy fled Henry's legs in an instant, and he slumped against the top of the couch. He massaged his brow, whilst the fingers of his opposite hand curled into the grey woollen blanket draped over the cushions. The wool sweated beneath his touch.

Alison looked to him. With her fists tucked into the ends of her sweater sleeves, she hugged her arms across her chest. The whites of her eyes were wide beneath the fronds of her fringe that fell across her forehead. "Dad?"

Stevie looked to him too, her bottom lip pinned beneath her teeth at one corner, and when he said nothing, her gaze swivelled to Russell. "Our uncle. He visited her the other day. At the clinic."

Russell's thumbs stilled and his shoulders pricked like someone had scraped their keys along the side of a car. "He what?" Then he turned to face Henry, slowly, as if unsure whether or not he'd hallucinated hearing that. His gaze flitted up and down, taking Henry in. "Henry…?"

Henry let his hand fall from his brow. It joined the other in gripping the cushion. "I asked him to go talk to her. I thought seeing him might help her, especially with all the guilt she—"

"You're not meant to be helping her." Russell's eyes darkened to tar whilst his features contorted with his snarl. "What part of me telling you to leave her the hell alone did you not understand?"

"She's my wife, Russell—"

"And you might very well have led her assassin straight to her."

"How was I meant to know he had a GPS tracker?"

"You weren't meant to get involved." Russell's voice strained. "Geez…" He swept one hand over his scalp, and then clutched his neck. His mouth drew tight and he shook his head to himself—it looked like he was trying to dam a stream of expletives. "Why can't people just do as I tell them?" He let out a huff, and then stared down at the screen of his cell phone. The eerie white glow lit his face as he punched a number into the keypad. "Give me his address and I'll have dispatch send someone over there now." He shot Henry a dark look. "And you'd better start praying to God or whatever else you believe in that Kostov didn't manage to get to her brother's car either."

Henry swallowed. His throat stuck. "You can't send someone to his house."

"Why the hell not?" Russell raised his cell phone to his ear.

"He's not at home."

"Then where is he?"

Henry averted his gaze to the floorboards. He shook his head, his grip on the cushions ever-tightening. "I spoke to him yesterday, to let him know that Conrad was planning to release the details of what happened… He said he was going back there today. To the clinic."

"When?"

Henry stilled. He looked up at Russell. "He's meant to be in a session with Elizabeth right now." The image of Elizabeth stood just beyond the window of the clinic, within touching distance yet a world away, flashed through his mind. Ice cold licks of dread wrapped around his stomach and bound his chest. "If he has a bomb and he parks outside the window…"

The words drifted into the room and succumbed to the thundering of the rain.

"Right." Russell scrolled through his contacts; his thumb moved so fast that it jittered against the trackball. He hit dial—"I'm calling this in."— and lifted the phone to his ear. "If he has access to bomb-making material and there's even the possibility that he has her location—"

The thud and squeak of rain-slick footsteps echoed through the kitchen. Agent Hayes strode around the corner and into the den. His cell phone was still clutched in one hand. "Mr Jackson?"

"A little busy here." Russell motioned to his own cell phone and turned his back on Agent Hayes so that he faced the back door.

"Mr Jackson, we've just had a hit on the credit card Kostov's been using."

Russell spun around. He covered the mouthpiece with his opposite hand. "What? Where?"

"At a gas station." Agent Hayes shook his head, and a puzzled frown worked its way across his brow. "But from the amount he's spent, it sounds like he's filling up a small truck."

Russell's eyes glazed. "Or loading up a car full of jerrycans." He shook off the expression and his gaze bored into Agent Hayes. "This gas station… How far is it from Fredericksburg, Virginia?"

Agent Hayes looked surprised. "Just outside… Why?"

* * *

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	81. Chapter Seventy-Nine: the gold mine o

**Chapter Seventy-Nine**

**…****the gold mine of childhood trauma.**

**Elizabeth**

**11:14 AM**

"Well, that went well." Elizabeth flumped back onto the cushions of the couch. Her arms hung loose beside her, and her fingers plucked at the leather whilst she stared through the glass of the coffee table, her gaze as soft as the yellowed light that swam across the carpet beneath. The prickle and thrum of the rain filled the room and thickened the already fuggy air.

"Do you fight often?" Dr Sherman asked.

"We don't fight, we just…" Elizabeth trailed off, and then, as the memories of all their fights filtered through her mind in bursts and snatches, she shook her head. Shook the truth away. She looked up at Dr Sherman with an attempt at a smile. It was no more than a twinge of the lips. "Sometimes things get a little heated, that's all."

"And why do you think that is?" Dr Sherman settled back in the armchair, her elbows propped against the armrests whilst she held a ballpoint pen in a bridge between both hands.

Elizabeth shoulders shimmied in a shrug. "Henry says it's because we're too similar."

"I can see where he's coming from." At the arch in Elizabeth's eyebrows, Dr Sherman raised her own eyebrows in a question. "You disagree?"

"We're not even remotely similar. Will's just…" She shook her head again as she sought the appropriate adjective. There were too many that came to mind—none of them complimentary—yet none of them alone was quite enough to define him. "…_Will_. We wouldn't have a problem if he'd just act like a normal human being."

"Why do you think he acts the way that he does?"

"I'm guessing you're angling for me to say it's because of what happened to our parents. I mean, being orphaned is practically the gold mine of childhood trauma."

"You already said that's why you think he became a doctor."

Elizabeth's eyes widened and she fixed Dr Sherman with a firm stare whilst her hand swept through wild gestures. "It's also because he wants to soak up the glory of saving people. Play the hero. Feed his narcissistic ego by being the saviour of the helpless. I mean, for a self-proclaimed atheist, he sure has one hell of a god complex."

She paused, her hand poised in mid-air with fingers flared. Her pulse throbbed through her, each beat an echo against the silence. But no sooner had the words settled like a layer of silken ash after an eruption than a pang of remorse struck her chest.

Her fingers closed in on themselves as her hand withdrew to her lap. Her chin dipped, and her voice softened. "He couldn't save our mother. It's not his fault, but he feels guilty about that."

"And you couldn't protect him. Do you feel guilty about that?"

She bit down on the inside of her cheek. Hard. The thought of him in the mangled car, no longer sharp-tongued and reckless but terrified and helpless, Dad dead, Mom dying, not knowing what to do, using his jumper as a makeshift tourniquet, staining his nail beds rusty red with Mom's blood, wandering alone by the side of the road, begging for help, unable to comprehend that the loving God they'd been raised with could have allowed that to happen…

She shook her head. "He shouldn't have had to go through that."

The drumming of the rain against the windowpane deepened the lull that suspended the room. Normally the sound of the rain pressing in would soothe her, a reminder that she was safe inside, but now she found no comfort in it, not when the sound trapped her in her head with those thoughts.

Dr Sherman opened her mouth, and then paused. She stooped forward and clasped her hands atop the navy blue notebook balanced in her lap, her ballpoint pen jutting from between them. "It interests me that, in a way, you and your brother had opposite experiences of the same event. Him being in the car with your parents, witnessing what happened and being unable to help at the time; you not finding out what had happened until later, and feeling that you ought to have been there or that you should have in some way been able to protect your brother from that in hindsight."

"Two sides of the same coin," Elizabeth muttered.

"It also strikes me that neither of you want to be without the other, you just have very different ways of showing it."

Elizabeth snorted and her gaze shot up to Dr Sherman. "What? Like him showing a flagrant disregard for his own life because he doesn't care if he dies or how that'll affect me, so long as he doesn't have to be the last Adams standing? Or like him cutting me out of his life altogether?"

Dr Sherman's shoulders rose in a shrug that didn't fade. "Sometimes we cling to the people we fear we might lose, other times we distance ourselves from them." She paused with lips parted and then gave Elizabeth a tug of a smile. "He came here today, didn't he?"

"And then stormed out again."

"Has he gone back to his car?"

Elizabeth opened her mouth and then stopped. There had been no footsteps scrunching through the gravel, no slam of the car door, no engine sputtering into life, no tyres grinding as Will backed the car out of the bay and then raced off down the track. The steel blue hatchback still sat in its space at the far end, empty.

She dismissed it with the shake of the head and lowered her gaze to her knees. "Probably because the key code on the door in reception doesn't match his date of birth."

She sensed more than saw Dr Sherman's smile, though—of course—it wasn't a joke.

Dr Sherman's gaze remained steady on her. "Do you think this feeling you have about needing to put your brother first could stem from you not being in the car with him and your parents that day, and not being able to protect him from what happened?"

Elizabeth considered that. Though she had considered it before. But if it was that, it didn't strike a chord inside, it didn't resonate with that feeling, it didn't illuminate nor sever the black thread woven into what Henry might call her soul. "I don't know…maybe."

"I think it would be useful for us to consider how your guilt and grief around your parents' deaths has interacted with your guilt and grief around the poisoning and your brother's illness."

Thirty-five years of guilt and grief only spoken about when it bubbled up and she was unable to suppress it anymore? Elizabeth's lips quirked at one corner. "That could take a while."

"That's what our outpatient sessions are for."

The mention of outpatient appointments felt like another prod, just one of many she'd had over the past few days. _You need to get back to the real world before it moves on without you._ She'd already overstayed her welcome. Time to go home.

Yet—

Elizabeth took a breath. It ached in her chest. She clutched her knees and rubbed her thumbs over the rough rasp of denim, whilst the ends of her hair swayed around her jaw. "I just need things to be good between me and Will, but that's not going to happen if he's refusing to talk to me."

Dr Sherman gave her a smile that seemed designed to allay her concerns. "Give him time to cool off. I'm sure he'll come round."

"I don't know…" Elizabeth's eyebrows raised, and her lips tweaked at one corner. Will excelled when it came to holding a grudge, but even if with time he did manage to let this go…

The last ginger snap stared up at her from its perch on the wad of blue-green paper towel atop the coffee table. This was meant to be the end of the path, or the end of this stage of the journey at least, but it felt like a nothingness, as anticlimactic as '_…and it was all just a dream._'.

She lifted her gaze to meet Dr Sherman's. "I guess I was looking for some kind of release, some kind of understanding, but maybe Russell's right, maybe there isn't any catharsis, maybe it's enough just to learn how to cope… Maybe I should go home."

The paperwork wouldn't take long, and the drive was only an hour or so, maybe more with all the rain. She would have most of the afternoon and all of the evening with Henry and the kids before she started at State again tomorrow. She'd welcome the mental stimulation, even if it came with the inevitable questions, awkward silences and wary glances at first. Maybe it was time.

She pressed her fists into the cushion and eased herself forward in the seat. The leather creaked beneath her. Her fingertips stretched for the biscuit, and—

The door swept open with a grating rush.

She startled, and spun around. Her heart thudded as hard as the rain that thrashed against the window. "Will. What the hell?"

"Why did you put me first?" Will stood just inside the door as it swung shut behind him. The half-wild look in his eyes that held all the intensity of teenage outrage and the way his voice cut through the room—a decibel shy of a shout—only disproved the theory that he might cool off. If anything, the anger had matured and festered like rancid wine. "You said you wanted to talk, so talk." He batted one hand towards her. "Why did you put me first?"

She gripped her thighs and rubbed the sweat from her palms against her jeans. "I wanted to talk about what happened to Mom and Dad, not have you storm in here and shout at me."

"This—" He motioned to her again. "—is nothing to do with Mom and Dad. They never told you to exhaust yourself trying to look after me."

"I promised them I'd look after you."

"They were dead, Lizzie." He chucked his scarf onto the arm of the couch, then stood at the opposite end to her and scowled down at her. "The only person you promised was yourself."

"They would've wanted me to look out for you. I'm your big—"

"They wouldn't have wanted you to get like this."

Her voice strained. "Will you stop saying that like I'm some kind of walking neurosis."

"Then stop acting like one." His voice shot up and resounded off the walls. He glared at her, the look so cold it burnt. "You know, Henry, your kids, they're terrified that something might happen to you, that they're going to lose you to this. I'd have thought that you of all people would appreciate what it's like to lose someone, especially a mother."

Guilt gripped her chest with its suffocative hold; a penance exacted with the weight of each breath. She pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head to herself. She tried to hold back the exasperation, but it wrenched at her tone. "I wasn't going to do anything."

"I've worked an ER, Lizzie. You have no idea how many people whose stomachs I've pumped and whose arms I've sutured who were never going to do anything. Then, before they know it, they're in the ER with me. And they've regretted it. That's if they're lucky."

"I wasn't going to…" Her head stilled, and she pinched her eyes shut. _Tell me you haven't thought about it… Please tell me that I'm wrong_. She tried to push away the fear that had swarmed in Henry's eyes, a panic so primal it hurt.

She let her hand drop, and she looked up at Will. "I know you're angry with me, and maybe you have the right to be, but I don't feel like that anymore."

"You shouldn't have let yourself get in that state in the first place." An echo of Henry's fear and hurt lurked in Will's eyes, beneath the currents of anger. "And it's not going to happen again." He strode along the channel between the coffee table and the couch, and then sank down onto the edge of the coffee table in front of her, so close that their knees almost touched. He stared at her. "So, why did you put me first?"

She didn't have an answer to that—if she did, they wouldn't be doing this now. But his gaze bored into her, so she fumbled for a response. "Because you were sick, you were in a coma."

"What about the other patients on the ward? Did their sisters camp out there?"

"No, but—"

"Why did you put me first?"

"Because I wanted to help you."

"And you couldn't help me after looking after yourself?"

"Well, in hindsight—" Her gaze drifted.

He tapped the side of her knee. "Why did you put me first?"

She dug for an answer, but it was like digging in dune sand; for each scoop she hauled out, another slipped down. Her chest tightened. Her mouth opened on nothing, and she had to wrench the words out. "Because you wouldn't have been in a coma if it weren't for me, for my job."

"Did you know someone was going to poison you?"

"No, of course not, but—"

"Did you know there was poison in the food?"

"No."

"So, why did you put me first?"

Her shoulders shimmied. "Because I felt guilty."

"Wrong answer."

Her eyes narrowed on him, and she drew her chin in. "You can't just say that's the wrong answer."

"I just did." He fixed her with a firm stare, and then wafted his hand at her. "This has nothing to do with guilt. You would have done exactly the same thing whether you felt responsible or not. Why did you put me first?"

She folded her arms across her chest and leant back. "Because you're my little brother."

"Wrong answer. Why did you put me first?"

"Because I love you, and it's my job to look after you."

"Wrong answer. Why did you put me first?"

"Because…I don't know." She tossed her hand up. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"I want you to tell me why you put me first."

Her eyes bugged. "And I'm telling you: I. Don't. Know."

"Why did you put me first?"

"Will, just stop—"

"No. Not until you tell me why."

"I don't know."

"Think." He tapped her knee.

Her jaw clenched. "I don't know."

"Why?"

"Will, I don't—"

"Why?"

"I don't—"

"Why?" He tapped her knee.

"I—"

"Why?" He tapped her knee.

"I—"

"Why?" He tapped her—

"Because you saved my life." The words burst out in a shout so harsh that it left her throat raw. Inside, a black thread snapped.

Will frowned and recoiled. "What?"

The black walnut tree loomed over his shoulder. Her heart lurched. "Oh God."

* * *

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	82. Chapter Eighty: Hail Marys

**Chapter Eighty**

**…****Hail Marys.**

**Henry**

**11:21 AM**

"All units dispatch immediately to…" Agent Hayes half-shouted down the phone as he read out the address of the clinic from the back of business card Russell had kept stashed in his wallet. The instructions that he gave his colleagues he half-shouted too, whilst he paced back and forth in front of the window beyond the kitchen table. The rain hammered against the glass and the gloom outside seeped in. The fronts of his black woollen overcoat flapped with each stride and each pivot on his heel. "Suspect was last seen driving a Silver Ford Focus outside Fredericksburg. Suspect may have access to a homemade explosive device…"

Henry shook his head and hit redial. He shot Russell a look as he raised his cell phone to his ear and paced behind the back of the couch. His heart thundered against his ribs as hard and as heavy as the rods of rain against the windows. "If he's already in Fredericksburg, they'll never get there in time. And don't tell me there are agents on the gate. They didn't so much as glance at me when I pulled up, just let me drive straight through." The call went straight to answerphone again. He scowled at the screen. "And why the hell don't her agents have satphones?"

"Because she's in Virginia, not Outer Mongolia, for crying out loud." Russell gave him a dark look and raised his own cell phone to his ear again. He turned away and faced the back door, where the net curtains ruffled in the draught. "Come on…come on…"

Henry hit redial again. His jaw tightened whilst he raised his cell phone to his ear and waited for the familiar patter of the answerphone message. "You knew there was no signal. You should have done something about it. Not just leave her stranded. If something happens to her—"

"Then that's on you." Russell spun around. His expression twisted into a snarl. "If it weren't for you sending her brother there with a goddamn tracker on his car—"

"I didn't know."

"—and if he hadn't gotten it into her head that she needed to stay there rather than coming home when she was supposed to, then none of this would be an issue."

"I was trying to help her."

"Well, you can put that on her goddamn headstone."

"Will the two of you just stop?" Stevie shouted. She, Alison and Jason clustered at the end of the kitchen island, each pale-faced and pinch-browed as they too went through cycle after cycle of hitting redial, raising their cell phones, lowering their cell phones, hitting redial…

Stevie had stopped with her thumb poised over the screen. Her gaze shot back and forth between Henry and Russell, her expression fixed in a scowl. "The two of you arguing over who's to blame isn't helping, and it doesn't matter anyway, so just stop it and focus on trying to get through."

She continued to scowl at them. In the background, Agent Hayes's half-shouts down the line to the local police department competed with the roar of the rain.

Stevie hit redial again, and still scowling at Henry and Russell, she raised her phone.

Henry cradled his cell phone in his palm and watched the kids whilst they continued to place call after call. The swarm of nausea that thickened the pit of his stomach roiled. They shouldn't be involved in this, they shouldn't be frantically and futilely dialling number after number in a bid to warn DS that someone was only minutes away from trying to kill their mother, he should have…

He should have what? He couldn't tell them everything would be okay and ask that they wait it out in their rooms; he couldn't lie and say, 'Of course Mom's safe. DS will protect her.'; he couldn't hide them from what was happening or offer them words of comfort.

Elizabeth's note to Stevie burned in the back pocket of his jeans. He'd forgotten about it until now. He hadn't passed it on because he thought it would bring them more worry than comfort. But what if that's all they had left? _I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you…_ For each birthday, each Thanksgiving, each Christmas. _I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you…_ For each graduation, each wedding, each birth. _I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you._

His gaze flicked back to the screen, he scrolled down to the clinic's number and hit dial again. When he lifted the phone to his ear, the _beep, beep, beep_ of the engaged tone taunted him. He hit dial again—_beep, beep, beep_—and again—_beep, beep, beep_. They had to get through.

"It's ringing." Jason grabbed Stevie's arm. "Uncle Will's phone's ringing."

Everyone turned to Jason and froze. No one dared take a breath. The only sound came from the rain pummelling against the doors and windows. Jason's face had ashened and his eyes had taken on a faraway glaze, whilst his fingertips dug so tight into Stevie's wrist that her skin blanched.

Forever could have passed in a matter of seconds. A lifetime compressed into a dot.

"Well?" Russell said.

Jason's throat bobbed. He shook his head. "He's not picking up." He lowered the phone and stared down at the screen, as though asking it what he had done wrong. His hand fell away from Stevie's arm. "Why's he not picking up?"

Henry pivoted to Russell. "Try Dr Sherman. If they're in the same room—"

But Russell had already lifted his phone to his ear. He met Henry's gaze. Fear lurked in the whites of his eyes. It was at once so honest and so unsettling. "She'll have it on silent… That's if she has it with her at all."

Yet he was trying anyway. Was that what they were down to? Hail Marys.

A moment later, Russell shook his head. His chest deflated. "Answerphone."

Agent Hayes edged past the chairs that stood between the kitchen table and the shelving unit behind. He cast a sideways glance to the kids, who had resumed jabbing at their touchscreens and lifting their phones to their ears, though their frowns had deepened now, their movements more jittery than before. He lowered his voice as he turned to Russell and Henry, his hands on his hips beneath the fronts of his overcoat. "Critical Incident Response are en route. The pilots can handle the rain, but even so, they're fifteen, maybe twenty minutes out." He gave a shrug that spoke more of nerves than nonchalance. "Local PD are on their way too. If they get there first, they'll get word to the secretary's detail."

The patter of rain thrummed through Henry's veins. It displaced his pulse. "Do we have fifteen minutes? Given where the gas station is compared to the clinic?"

"Five minutes ago, maybe. Now…?" Agent Hayes drew in a sharp breath and shook his head. He avoided Henry's gaze. "It's going to be close. If we can't get through and warn her detail, and if he has a bomb, and a potentially volatile one at that—"

"Hello?" Alison said.

Agent Hayes stopped. He twisted around to face Alison.

Alison stood halfway between the kitchen island and the table. Her cell phone was pinned to one ear, the first two fingers of her opposite hand pressed to the other. "This is Alison McCord, Elizabeth McCord's daughter… I know she hasn't given permission for you to talk to me, but… If you'd just… It's important…"

Russell charged forward, and Agent Hayes jumped out of the way. Russell snatched the phone from Alison, clutched it to his ear, and turned his back on her whilst she held her hands up in either shock or surrender, or both. "This is Russell Jackson. I need to speak to a member of Secretary McCord's security detail now—. I said: Now."

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


	83. Chapter Eighty-One: the black walnut

**Chapter Eighty-One**

**…****the black walnut tree.**

**Elizabeth**

**11:29 AM**

"Because you saved my life." The words burst out in a shout so harsh that it left Elizabeth's throat raw. Inside her, a black thread snapped.

Will frowned and recoiled. "What?"

The black walnut tree loomed over his shoulder. Her heart lurched. "Oh God."

"What are you talking about? Lizzie…?"

Elizabeth staggered up from the couch. Her knees bumped against Will's as she jostled past him, and the heat of two gazes followed her as she strode towards the rain-streaked window. The grey-green trunk of the black walnut tree thrust up from the wilted grass, and through the haze of raindrops and condensation, it formed a blurred shadow. She wiped away the mist with the side of her fist and arm, the droplets chill against her bare skin. Leaf-barren boughs spidered against the grey gloom. Day blackened into night. Stars pricked the sky. The glass dissolved into nothing.

"Lizzie…? Lizzie…?"

Will's voice and the drumming of the rain ebbed into another world.

Elizabeth sat on the top step of the front porch—the wood beneath her bare soles buffed smooth by all the footsteps that had scuffed over it before—and as she hugged her knees towards her chest, she stared out along the gravel track that wound along the far side of the paddock and curved towards the house, though most of it was swathed in the night's velvet shadows.

In ten seconds, the tyres of her father's charcoal grey Buick would rumble over the gravel and its headlights would bounce along the track, the light strobing as it disappeared behind the trunks of the white ash trees. _Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one._

The leaves of the ash trees whispered in the breeze. They jeered and taunted her.

She pursed her lips, and hardened her stare. Okay, in ten more. _Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one_.

Behind her the porch swing creaked its squeaky laugh.

Her fingers curled into fists. Just ten more. _Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one-and-three-quarters…one-and-a-half…one-and-one-quarter…one-and-one-eighth…one-and-one-sixteenth…_

She scowled. This was so typical. They'd probably decided to go out for pizza, or to the mall, or maybe to the movies. Will was always bugging their parents to take them to the theatre more. They were probably having such a great time that they'd forgotten all about her. They had always preferred Will. And there she was—stupidly waiting for them on the porch, as if she didn't have better things to do. Well, she'd show them. When they arrived, she'd storm off and slam the front door just to show them how inconsiderate they were. She wouldn't talk to them for a whole week. She wouldn't even acknowledge them. Who needed them anyway?

Yet her fingers flexed and drummed against the sides of her knees. _Just ten seconds more_. _Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…_

White headlights arced onto the end of the track. Gravel churned and popped.

Elizabeth rose from her perch, and as her heart pounded—one beat telling her to shrug it off and pretend like it hadn't bothered her at all that they'd practically abandoned her, the next demanding that she punish them for being so thoughtless—she smoothed her palms down the rough wool of her skirt and rid them of the clammy film of sweat that had taken hold. She stepped down towards the track. Her hand trailed along the wooden railing; her fingertips bumped against the notches and knobbles. When she reached the bottom step, she stopped. The sea of gravel swarmed before her and threatened to jab its shards into her bare soles.

She still hadn't decided exactly how she was going to play it, when the headlights curved around the far side of the paddock and onto the stretch of track in front of the house. Maybe she should greet them with silence, see what they had to say for themselves; if they were apologetic, she could milk it for all it was worth, and if not…well, storming up the steps prior to slamming the door would add an extra flounce.

The headlights sailed nearer and nearer. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, whilst her fingers plucked and prised at the cap of the wooden post. The gravel roared beneath the hum of the engine. In the background, the leaves of the white ash trees spilled their secrets to the breeze. Though the air was warm, it prickled.

The car creaked to a halt. But why hadn't it turned off and pulled into the space with the tufts of grass and patches of dusty earth where her father normally parked? The headlights blinked into darkness. And why were there those markings on the side of the car and what was that beacon doing on top? The doors clunked open. And why was there a policeman climbing out and what was he doing with Will? Footsteps trudged through the gravel. And why was the man's face so ashen and why were Will's eyes red and swollen? The footsteps scrunched to a stop. And where were Mom and—

The policeman looked up at her. The whites of his eyes glistened in the light that seeped out from the house. His pupils gaped into two soulless pools. His lips parted. His chest rose with a breath. It froze.

The silence strained as each second stretched into a lifetime. The silence spoke of ghosts.

"Miss Adams—"

Elizabeth's whole body tensed and lurched as though she'd been thrust to the cusp of a thousand-foot drop. "No." She shook her head. Her hair whipped against her skin. "No."

"Miss Adams—"

"No." They were meant to have gone to the movies without her, they were meant to have forgotten about her all alone at home.

"Miss Adams, please—"

She wasn't going to speak to them for a whole week. She wasn't even going to acknowledge them. She wasn't going to speak to them ever ag—

"No," she shouted so loud her throat burned.

Silence.

And then she ran.

"Elizabeth!" Will's shout chased her through the darkness. "Elizabeth!"

She ran.

She ran.

She ran.

"Lizzie…? Lizzie…?" Will's voice cut over the thunder of the rain against the window.

She blinked. The shadows of night and the swarm of stars that seethed above the black walnut tree faded into the grey midday gloom. The fields in front of her melted into a sea of gravel. Rolling grasses disappeared, and parked cars emerged through the rain-streaked glass. White lights bounced and ricocheted through the spines of the paper birches. Somewhere an alarm was going off. Not the panic alarm. A different alarm. And in the distance, sirens blared.

"Lizzie?" Will stood next to her in front of the window. He laid his hand against her elbow and dipped his head to catch her gaze. "Are you all right?"

Somehow raindrops had made it through the glass; they rolled down her cheeks and tumbled from the line of her jaw. She looked up at Will. The moment she opened her mouth, the words tumbled out—an incoherent stream that tripped off the tip of her tongue as the black thread that had snapped inside her left her world to unravel. "I ran. I didn't want to lose them. So I ran. And there was the paddock and the field and the old quarry and the black walnut tree and the fence that had blown down in that storm. And I thought if I didn't hear him say it, then it wouldn't be true. And I thought maybe I would fly away from it all, or maybe I would just fall, and either way I'd never have to hear it and it would never be true. I would never be an orphan. But then you were there and you were begging me to take your hand, and I couldn't do that to you. I couldn't leave you alone with no one to look after you, no one to protect you. But I didn't want to lose them, so I wanted to… But you needed me, so I put you first, and I took your hand." She grabbed his hand and clung to him, as though the blackness of the quarry might open up beneath her once more. "Putting you first saved me, Will. You saved me. I wouldn't be alive without you."

Will's eyes grew wider and whiter as she rambled. Confusion melded into horror, horror gave rise to realisation, realisation dawned into fresh horror as deep as the shadows of the abandoned quarry. He studied her eyes, and as he did, his gaze flitted back and forth, as though he were running abacus beads from side to side, trying to figure out what all the words she had just spewed out added up to. His mouth opened and closed. His throat bobbed. His lips parted again. The words stumbled out. "I thought you tripped."

Elizabeth nodded—adamant. "I did."

Then she stilled.

She winced.

She squeezed his hand, his fingers clammy against her own. "But I wanted to let go."

The sirens blared so loud that her ears ached and rang. The _cra-ack_ of gunshots jarred up the back of her neck and tension spread like frost across the inside of her skull. Her heart thudded, and as her muscles shivered with adrenaline, she dropped Will's hand and spun to face the window.

A silver car hurtled through the valley between the mottled white spines of the paper birch trees; it bounced and lurched over the bumps in the track, a black SUV in pursuit. Headlights flooded into the therapy room and refracted through the raindrops that dotted and veined the glass. _Do you remember the fireflies?_ The beams cut below the lowest bough of the black walnut tree and ploughed straight towards Elizabeth and Will.

Elizabeth squinted at the glare and raised one arm to shield her eyes.

_Cra-ack. Cra-ack._

The door flung open behind them and hit the wall. The slam and rattle shook through the room. Matt's shout echoed off the walls—once white, now stained with every last one of Elizabeth's thoughts. "Ma'am, get away from the window!"

But trapped in the beams, she froze. Her fingers trembled and thirsted for Will's.

'_Take my hand_.'

Fly or fall?

_'__Take my hand.'_

BOOM.


	84. Chapter Eighty-Two: the moments that

**Chapter Eighty-Two**

**…****the moments that Henry remembered.**

**Henry**

**11:41 AM**

The drumming of the rain against the window panes filled the kitchen and the den; it stiffened the air and pressed in from all sides until it felt as though they were trapped in a tunnel of sound. No one spoke. Russell stood by the window at the far end of the kitchen table and stared out vacantly into the grey gloom beyond the net curtains, his hands on his hips pushing back the folds of his black overcoat. Beads of rain still clung to the wool. It felt like they were waiting for every last one of those pearls to evaporate before they would hear whether the FBI had caught Kostov.

Henry pushed up the sleeve of his shirt again and frowned down at his watch—again. The CIRG agents must have been there by now, surely, and the local PD officers too. You'd think one of them could have called. But they'd have more important things to do, of course, like securing a perimeter around the clinic, making sure Elizabeth and Will were safe, finding a way to stop Kostov without detonating the bomb—if he had a bomb. No news was good news.

Or so he kept telling himself.

He tugged the cuff of his sleeve down, and eased away from the edge of the shelving unit where he'd been perched. Stevie and Alison sat with their backs to him, their elbows propped to the kitchen table, their hands folded in front of them and hiding their mouths. He squeezed their shoulders, and as they twisted around to look up at him with eyes white with worry, he gave them both a taut smile. It was meant to reassure them—they had gotten through to the clinic, they had warned DS about Kostov, Mom would be fine.

But they didn't return the smile. And after a moment, they resumed staring distantly out across the kitchen, past Agent Hayes who leant against the stool at the end of the island, the photographs that sprawled across the tabletop in front of them—and that had brought them that moment of connection before—now forgotten.

There was nothing quite as lonely as being in a room full of people but being trapped in one's own fears and thoughts.

The trill of a cell phone cut through the thrum of the rain.

Russell pivoted to face Agent Hayes, his eyes wide and his eyebrows arched. The girls withdrew from the tabletop, and their shoulders tensed beneath Henry's touch. Jason straightened up from his hunch in the chair at the head of the table, and he wiped his palms down against his jeans. The thrum of the rain threaded through Henry's veins and dissolved all thought.

"Agent Hayes." Agent Hayes stepped away from the stool and turned his back on them as he clutched his cell phone to his ear. He wandered away along the channel between the island and the countertop. When he reached the far end, he came to a stop.

Seconds stretched into minutes; minutes spun into hours; silence hushed the rain.

Then— "Thank you for letting me know."

With his back still to them, Agent Hayes lowered his cell phone, and cradling it in his palm, he stared down at the screen, though the screen emitted no light of its own, just reflected ripples from the lamps overhead.

After a long moment, he slipped the phone into the pocket of his overcoat. His shoulders rose with a heavy breath, and the drops of rain that beaded the black wool glistened.

"So?" Russell demanded. "Did they get him? Did they catch Kostov?"

Agent Hayes pushed his shoulders back and straightened up. He turned to face the table. But rather than answering Russell, he stared straight past him and looked to Henry instead. It felt as though a wall had risen up around the agent, and his soul had retreated inside. "Dr McCord…"

A clammy roil of nausea rolled through Henry in an unrelenting tidal wave. A thick tang of saliva flooded his mouth. His jaw clenched. _Elizabeth_.

"No." He shook his head, his jaw so tight he had to force the word out.

"Dr McCord—"

"No." He shook his head again. His hands fell away from the girls' shoulders and hung empty at his sides. "We got through to them. We warned them."

"Dr McCord—"

"No! We warned them." His voice strained. "We _warned_ them." He spun to Russell. "You promised me she'd be safe. You promised me he wouldn't go anywhere near her. You promised."

He waited for the retort, but Russell just bowed his head and avoided Henry's gaze.

The silence ached. Henry's voice surged to a shout. "Why didn't they stop him?"

"Dr McCord—" Agent Hayes had been creeping towards the near end of the kitchen island half-step by half-step, but at the shout he stopped. "—the agents on the gates only received word of Kostov's approach after he was on the track heading towards the clinic. They pursued, but Kostov accelerated, and when the agents fired shots, Kostov lost control of the vehicle. The vehicle crashed, causing the bomb to go off—"

Henry sank back against the shelves. One hand wrapped around the wood so tight that his nails chipped the white paint; his other hand clutched the bridge of his nose. "Is my wife alive?"

"With the amount of fuel in the car, the explosion was significant—"

"Is my wife alive?"

"Due to the fire and the risk of a secondary explosion, our agents are currently unable to reach the building—"

His eyes snapped open, and he glared at Agent Hayes. "Tell me: Is my wife alive?"

Agent Hayes's mouth opened, and then closed. His throat bobbed with his swallow. "They'll keep trying to make contact, but…there's no response from inside."

Silence engulfed the room. Even the thrashing of the rain succumbed to that endless sound.

No one moved.

Henry couldn't move if he wanted to. His whole body had turned to a solid block of numb.

The photographs sprawled across the table in front of him. Each one a millisecond of life.

o

Elizabeth cradled the glass of Merlot to her chest, the stem slipped between her third and fourth fingers, whilst the kids' wails reverberated through dining room and shook off the walls—now thick with mashed potato. Her gaze cut through Henry sharper than a vasectomy scalpel could. "The next time you so much as think about impregnating me, I want you to remember this scene." She raised her glass to him, and gave him a nod, just as a floret of broccoli whistled past his ear and landed with a wet splat on the floor. "Happy Thanksgiving, Henry."

o

Elizabeth's chin dipped, and the strands of hair that Henry had just tucked behind her ear swayed forward again to wisp around her face whilst her lips parted over unspoken words. When she met his eye, it was with a blue so pure that the world around them fell away and reminded him of the breathless thrill that comes when a plane soars up to the heavens. "I think it's sexy that you eat real food, not protein bars. I love it that you let our weird son force-feed you biscuits, and that you make fairy cakes with our girls. I think it's hot that you keep fit trying to keep our unruly brood in line rather than pumping iron at the gym. I like it that you ditch your Sunday morning run to cuddle with me in bed." She squeezed his hand where it rested atop her knee, and his heart melted. "That's what your body means to me."

o

The hush of snow twirled beyond the blackened window. Stevie lay with her cheek pressed to Elizabeth's chest, the marl blue t-shirt tucked around her, her fists opening and closing on either side of her head. She peered up at Henry with one half-open, all-blue eye. Henry brushed his fingertips over the strands of soft-soft hair, and then stilled as his thoughts turned to Elizabeth—haunted by the family she had lost, perhaps more so now that she was surrounded by the family that she had. His heart ached. "I hope you never truly understand."

o

"Wait for it." The gleam in Jason's eye took on a dangerous edge. "Dad…or Buttercup?"

"Oooooh." Stevie and Alison chorused. They leant into their arms folded atop the kitchen table, whilst their gazes swivelled to Elizabeth, mischief alight in their eyes.

o

Elizabeth stood in front of the dresser with her hands on her hips and her hair disheveled from its high ponytail, though not half as disheveled as the avalanche of clothes that heaped across their bed and spilled down towards the bag on the floor. "And is it okay if I take the second drawer for pyjamas and bras? Because you rarely wear the former and, I have to say, I'd be a little bit concerned if I found you wearing the latter."

o

Elizabeth sat across from Henry on the weather-worn bench, one leg folded in front of her to mirror his stance, their fingers tangled together atop the upper slat of wood. The golden glow from the Pavilions groped through the night and tinged the edges of the darkness that surrounded them, whilst the scent of barbecue coals still smouldered on in the air. Her smile widened. "So, basically, you're telling me that I have no choice?"

"Of course you have a choice, but I'm not going to stop until you make the right choice."

"I see… And the right choice would be dating you?"

o

Knelt on the burnt-orange bench at the end of their bed, Elizabeth looked down into Henry's eyes and toyed with the hair at his nape. "I'm okay." Then she tilted her head to one side and leant back until her hips arched into him. "Possibly working my way towards a stomach ulcer—" Her gaze returned to his and a smile lit her lips. "—but okay."

He massaged circles through the silk of her blouse as he clung to her waist. "You sure?"

"Really." She nodded. A pause as she searched his eyes. "Trust me?"

He gave her a soft smile. "Always."

o

Elizabeth stood with her back to the door—its once white paint now smeared with handprints and scribbles of blue Crayola. A tear trickled down her cheek, and she swiped it aside with the edge of her thumb. But then a second tear rolled down too fast for her to catch. It tumbled and splashed against the bathroom tiles. Her gaze trembled as she met his eye. "He loved me, Henry."

o

The blue-white glow from the television screen seeped through the darkness of the den and reflected in Elizabeth's eyes. Shadows danced across her face and left her expression all the more vacant, as though the spark in her soul had flickered out. The car crashed through the barrier at the edge of the track. It flipped and then rolled over, again and again and again. 'Game Over' lit the screen in red and Elizabeth's whole body tensed. Silence. Then— "I can't do this, Henry."

o

Henry lowered the house phone and clutched it at his side. Stevie had carried a lime green plastic stool down from her bedroom and propped it in front of the narrow ledge next to the front door, so that she could kneel there and rest her chin to her arms as she stared out of the darkened window into the amber pools of streetlights. At each roar of tyres across the tarmac, her head lifted and the sparks that had drained from her eyes momentarily relit.

He opened his mouth. He tasted the silence. What was he meant to say? "Stevie, honey, I just had a call… I'm sorry, but Mommy missed her flight."

o

In the shadows of his adolescence-stained bedroom, Henry cradled Elizabeth's head to his shoulder and stroked her silky soft hair whilst she fisted his tee as though afraid he might slip from her grasp. Scrunched up tissues littered the floor around the wicker chair in the corner and half-filled the mesh bin beneath his old desk. Elizabeth's chest shuddered against his with each breath, and her lips moved against the crook of his neck. "I don't want to ruin your weekend with your family. And I don't want to be the girl crying in your room."

o

A frown dawned across Henry's brow, and he swivelled to look at Elizabeth where she sat next to him at the desk beneath the arched window of the library. The sunlight unspooled through the glass and shimmered off her hair. "Babe…? Why do you have E equals M C squared written all over the inside cover of your notebook?" His frown deepened, and he leant in for a closer look. His nose wrinkled. "And are those…_love hearts_?"

Elizabeth turned to him, and her eyes widened as her gaze fell to the offending object. A flush of scarlet flooded her cheeks. "Oh my God…_Will._"

o

"You're home early." At the clunk of high heels being kicked against the wall in the hall and toppling onto the floorboards, Henry twisted to face the doorway to the kitchen. "Dinner'll be at least an hour." He returned to the stove, stirred the ragu, and then placed the lid on the saucepan and balanced the wooden spoon on top. He dialled down the gas to a blue simmer.

"Good. That gives us time to talk."

"Good talk or bad talk?" He flung the Snoopy and Charlie Brown tea towel over his shoulder and turned around. But then he frowned when he found Elizabeth stood in front of him, a nervous smile straining at the corners of her lips, whilst her fingers fumbled over the edges of the glossy orange cardboard box that she clutched in both hands. "What's with the ginger snaps?"

o

Jason groaned and wrapped his arms around the heap of cards that lay atop the kitchen table, and then dragged them towards himself. Meanwhile, Stevie cackled.

Henry clunked down the bowl of popcorn and slid it towards the middle of the table. "How many times do I have to tell you? Don't play Cheat with someone who can beat a polygraph."

o

The swirling confetti of cherry blossom tumbled down around Elizabeth where she sat on the chipped-white bench, one leg bent in front of her, her gestures animating her as she either ranted or rhapsodised at the man in a tweed suit perched at the opposite end. The subtle tug of the almondy scent reeled Henry in as he strode along the path towards them, his pace a touch quicker than before. The other man was so absorbed in Elizabeth that he didn't look up until Henry was no more than three strides away. Henry frowned at Elizabeth. "Babe…? Everything all right?"

o

Stevie's fingers plucked at the tumbler that she clutched in both hands, the inside of the glass still thick with the whitewash of milk. She stared across the kitchen table, with its scattering of biscuit crumbs, and towards her mother. "So why did you leave?"

Elizabeth traced her gaze up from where her fingers laced through Henry's, and she met his eye with a bittersweet smile. "Because, even if it hurts, and even if I'm missing them right now, and even if I sometimes say otherwise, I know that it was the right thing to do."

o

"Been for a run?" Henry wrapped his arms around Elizabeth, engulfing her where she stood in front of the vanity table, and he trailed kisses along the curve of her neck and down to her shoulder. Her skin was damp and warm. He slipped his hands beneath the hem of her tee, and at the hitch in her breath and as her eyes slipped shut in the reflection in the mirror, he grinned. "How about I help you warm down?"

o

The wall pressed cold against Henry's back as he hid in the shadows of the pantry, clothed in nothing more than his boxer shorts. His heart thudded so loud that he was sure it would betray his current location, that is if Jay would stop jabbering on and on and on about Sudan.

Jay fell silent. Then— "It's Valentine's Day, isn't it?"

"Kinda," Elizabeth said.

"…And that's not your shirt."

o

Sunlight unravelled though the arched window and spilled across the oak desk where Elizabeth was currently trailing her fingertips up and down the length of Henry's fingers. "So…" She stilled, and her gaze dipped as the hint of a blush warmed her cheeks. "Do you think if you were to look at my soul today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, all the way up until I'm so old that whenever it's cold my hip aches, that you would see me—the essence of who I am—every day?"

o

Elizabeth gazed down at the baby boy cradled to her chest. He stared up at his parents with one suspicious dark blue eye, and his ears wiggled as he nursed. "Henry, he's beautiful."

Henry nestled closer against her side and pressed a kissed to her sweat-slicked temple, where the straggles of hair still clung. "Just like his mom."

o

The living room hung in semi-darkness. The only light came from the amber glare of the street lamps that cut through the slats of the blinds, and the diffusion of the off-white glow from the bulb at the bottom of the stairs. Henry stopped bouncing Jason against his knee and frowned up at Elizabeth as she raked her fingers through her roots. "Can I ask where?"

"You can. But you know I can't answer."

His jaw clenched. "It's Stevie's birthday next week."

"And I promise I'll be back."

o

Henry halted in the entrance to the living room. Two blonde heads peered at him over the back of the couch. Elizabeth's eyes were rimmed red and her gaze was glassy with what smelt like Scotch. His gaze flitted to Will, and then back to Elizabeth. "Can I…can I speak to you a moment?"

"That depends." Elizabeth slurred her words just enough to confirm that it was Scotch in the mug that she clutched to her chest. Her fingers flexed around the ceramic. "Are you here for your stuff?"

o

Henry scrambled off the end of the polished metal slide and knelt down next to Elizabeth where she lay flat out atop the balding turf. "Babe, you okay?"

Elizabeth eased herself up to sitting, and then grabbed the front of Henry's sweat-and-beer-stained shirt and pulled him in for a searing kiss. The fug of exhaust fumes and the promise of frost, the cloying scent of deep-fried doughnuts and cotton candy clouds, the lilt of calliope music and squeals of laughter faded into the background. At the chorus of wolf-whistles they broke apart, and Elizabeth grinned up at him with neon lights reflected in her eyes. "Let's do that again."

o

"So, why math?" Henry studied Elizabeth as she forked a tangle of sauce-drenched linguine into her mouth.

She pressed the back of her hand to her lips, and her eyes smiled at him whilst she hurried to chew and swallow her bite. Her mouth was still half-full when she said, "Because math is elegant."

He arched his eyebrows at her. "Elegant?"

She folded her arms atop the tablecloth and leant into them, and the silver chain with its turquoise pendant swayed away from the base of her throat. A faraway look clouded her eyes whilst she stared out through the candlelight-suffused glow of the restaurant. "Because math makes the complex simple, it identifies the pattern in the chaos. Because math is a form of discovery that points to a fundamental truth. Because math provides not only an answer, but beauty in understanding." Then her gaze returned to his, and she cracked a smile. "And it doesn't hurt that it comes with far fewer essays too."

* * *

"…there's no response from inside."

The photographs sprawled across the kitchen table. Each one a millisecond of life.

Those weren't the moments that Henry remembered now though, and they weren't the moments he would define Elizabeth by. She was the moments in between. She was the moments a camera couldn't capture. She was the moments he prayed would forever be preserved in his mind. Moments when they'd been so rapt in love and fear and joy and hate and togetherness and…

Life.

Nothing worth feeling was simple. Chaos was the reality that pattern attempted to hide. And the only fundamental truth was this: Everyone, without exception, will die.

And when they did?

Memories. That's what they left behind.

He would remember all the times she had been strong; he would remember all the times she had broken in his arms; he would remember how all those times were an echo of the unfathomable things she had overcome; so that when the ice cold waters of numb ebbed and the turbid depths of grief rushed in, he would remember to allow himself to fall apart—just for a little while—and then he would remember to pull himself together again, because that's what she would want. And each time that he looked to the sky, his heart would ache for the future that he had lost, before he found comfort in remembrance of the past that they had shared, and he would remind himself that her soul was still out there: waiting—for him.

But for now he would listen to the drumming of the rain as the heavens wept, and he would drink in the silent stillness of the room, and as the seconds gaped into minutes and the minutes gaped into a void into which all feeling went, he would try to make sense of what no formula could:

He had given her his glasses, yet: "…there's no response from inside."

* * *

At some point the rain had stopped, and the sound of silence thinned. Leant back in the chair at the head of the table, with one arm folded across his chest, his fingers bunched into a fumbling fist, Jason swiped a tear from his cheek using the heel of his thumb. The smear glistened across his skin.

Henry pushed himself away from the shelving unit he had been slumped against, and he shuffled towards his son.

But Jason shook his head and folded his other arm across his chest too. His scowl deepened as he stared silently at the sea of photographs, and silently his tears rolled down.

Henry paused for a moment, and then gripped Jason's shoulder anyway. The other arm he wrapped around Jason, and he pulled Jason's head to his stomach and cradled him there—_He's beautiful, Henry…Our son._—and as he did, he both hid the photographs of Elizabeth from Jason and hid Jason's tears from the rest of the room.

The girls stared soullessly at the photographs too. Their eyes were red-rimmed. Their fists were tucked into the ends of their sweater sleeves, and their fingers worried the edge of the cotton. Black tracks stained Alison's cheeks, whilst beneath the glow of the lights, Stevie's tears shone white where they had coursed through her foundation. Neither sobbed, nor shook, nor brushed the tears aside, just let them spill down and splash onto the glossy sheets that sprawled before them.

The ghosts of their own carefree smiles beamed up at them.

Stood at the opposite end of the table, Russell cleared his throat. His voice scratched against the silence. "I should…I should brief POTUS."

But he didn't move. Instead he remained stood beyond the photographs, with his head bowed and his gaze lowered as though it were too much to look directly at either Henry or the kids. After all, grief could turn people to stone. It felt as though he were seeking their permission to leave, or perhaps seeking the right words to say, only to find again and again and again that there were none.

Henry didn't give him permission though, just cradled Jason against him and stroked Jason's hair whilst tears seeped through his shirt and dampened his skin. He might not be able to comfort his son, but the very least he could do was give him permission to let the tears flow.

After a moment or so longer, Russell drifted away into the kitchen, and with a jerk of his head towards the dining room, he motioned for Agent Hayes to leave too. Their footsteps led a solemn march that echoed through the house before they faded into nothingness.

That silent stillness returned. It ached even more than before, as though the death of each sound deepened it, and the deeper it grew, the more it hungered to swallow.

The pained pinch in Stevie's brow crumpled into a frown, and she reached out one hand towards the swell of photographs. Her fingers trembled. With her fingertips, she brushed away the overlying images, as gently as an archeologist would sweep away the top layer of sand, and then between forefinger and thumb, she gripped the corner of a photograph that had been half-concealed before. She tugged at it and eased it out until it slipped free from the pile.

It was a grayscale image, the edges curled and faded with time.

Stevie looked up at Henry. Alison peered at the photograph and then looked up at Henry too. Their eyes welled with tears, overflowing pools. Stevie's lips parted over an unspoken question.

Henry nodded in reply. His grip on Jason tightened. Whether it was for Jason's sake or for his own, he didn't know. He found out a moment later, though, when Stevie eased up from her chair.

The feet of the chair scuffed against the floorboards. The sound grated through the room, and fed the ensuing silence. With the photograph pinched between the forefinger and thumb of her left hand, she raised her right hand to one eye and then the other, and blotted away her tears with the cotton that stretched over the heel of her palm. She squeezed through the gap between her chair and Alison's, stared down at the photograph one last time, and then propped it against one of the never-lit candles on the shelf. It stood next to the frame that held Elizabeth and Will.

At the sight of the two photographs stood side by side—one taken by Elizabeth's father, a portrait of Elizabeth and Will that captured that last burst of innocence before the car crash that would follow; the other taken by Elizabeth herself, a candid shot of her parents sat side by side on the wooden porch swing of the house that would forever be her first home—Henry's heart broke. It rent open a hole in his chest into which all the silence in the world flowed.

Scalding tears spilled down his cheeks, and his breath hitched in his throat. Jason and Alison surged up from their chairs, and they flung themselves into his arms. He dragged Stevie into the embrace too, and he clung to the three of them, whilst silence turned to shaky breaths and hiccuped sobs. He wished that he had spoken to Elizabeth when he had driven to the clinic, rather than just watching her through the glass. He wished that he could see the smile he'd travel halfway across the world for, and that he could hear her laugh. He wished that he would open his eyes and find himself in their bed with her soft warmth snuggled in his arms. He _could_ live without her—that realisation had hit him nearly thirty years ago—but each second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year that he'd shared with her since only strengthened his conviction: there was nothing at all in the world that would make him want to.

It wasn't meant to end like this.

He wasn't ready to let her go.

"Henry." Russell's shout echoed through the house. "Henry."

The kids stepped aside, and they all turned to face the kitchen as footsteps thundered through.

"Henry." Russell skidded to a stop in the doorway to the dining room. His chest heaved over his breath. "They've got her. DS have got her. They've got Bess."

Tears clung to Henry's words and thickened them so much that he choked. "She's alive?"

Russell nodded. "Cuts and bruises, but otherwise she's fine."

Henry's legs gave way beneath him, but the jostling of the kids held him up. They clutched one another and hugged one another as tears flowed freely again, though this time the tears gave life to watery smiles, gulping breaths and winded laughs. Henry's mind reeled, borne on the tides of a maelstrom. Once again he was lost for what to feel. But it was the opposite of numb. It was joy and love and relief and shock and hope and euphoria and confusion, it was another one of the nine lives lost, it was a step closer to death, it was a rebirth, it was a reaffirmation.

It was—

His mind stalled. His heart dropped. Silence filled his chest. "What about Will?"

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	85. Chapter Eighty-Three: the fallout

**Chapter Eighty-Three**

**…****the fallout.**

**Elizabeth**

**12:30 PM**

What remained of the black walnut tree listed at a thirty degree angle towards the clinic building, whilst what remained of Kostov's car wrapped around the tree trunk in a fatal embrace. Both still smouldered in a mangled mess of charred wood and ripped-up metal, and plumes of black and grey smoke billowed up to clog the air and cloud the crisp blue skies. Ambulances, police cars, an array of FBI vehicles and the bomb squad truck lined the gravel track that wound towards the grey stone pillars in the distance, and they peeked out from behind the wraithlike trunks of the paper birches. The fire engine was stationed at the end of the track nearest to the car park, and the gush of foam continued to spurt and spray from the nozzle of the deck gun; it doused the shredded scraps of metal that occupied the parking bays and occasionally pivoted back to the black walnut tree and Kostov's car to smother the threat of an orange glow before it could take hold once more.

The warmth from the fires groped across the car park and brushed up against Elizabeth where she perched on the concrete ledge outside the main entrance, a woollen blanket that DS had taken from the laundry room folded beneath her, both shielding her from the rain that had soaked into the slabs and cushioning her. Her knees were bunched towards her chest, her right arm—now cleaned, sutured and dressed—rested atop them, whilst the balls of her sneakers pressed into the gravel and their heels gaped away from her gauze-bandaged soles. Shrapnel of bark from the black walnut tree littered the car park, along with fist-sized chunks of its upper branches. Some of those pieces still smouldered too, and the sweetness of woodsmoke and damp from the rain wove with the acridity of gasoline and burnt rubber.

The scene probably ought to have inspired some kind of awestruck horror, after all the explosion had been designed to kill her and the blown-in glass had left her with a meteor shower of tiny and not so tiny cuts across her hands, feet, face and arms, but with the gentle warmth of the flames fending off the winter chill and all the firefighters, paramedics, policemen, FBI agents, bomb squad technicians and members of her own detail milling around, she drank in the scene with a thirsty stare as though she were a child watching the crowd that had gathered for a bonfire.

Something niggled about that. A light frown settled on her brow. She opened her mouth, and then paused before murmuring, "We turned out all right…right?"

There came a shout from one of the firemen for everyone to get back as orange and scarlet flames flared beneath what used to be the front end of Kostov's car. The deck gun of the fire engine pivoted away from the row of blackened car shells that formed a series of stepping stones towards the blown-in window of the therapy room, and the spray of foam arced through the air towards the black walnut tree and the remnants of the Ford Focus.

"Sure," Will said, from where he sat beside her.

The trunk of the black walnut tree groaned and cracked. It strained against the last of the roots that tethered it to the grassy island, and as it hungered towards the ground, it levered Kostov's car higher and higher into the air, eliciting another cry of, '_Get back! Everybody back!_' from a gesticulating fireman.

A moment later, the tree crashed to the gravel and a burst of flames rippled along its length before they divided and tore along the remaining branches.

Everyone stared on with wide eyes and open mouths, frozen in the echoing silence.

Everyone except for Elizabeth, whose chin had dipped as she tried to smother the smirk that had sprung to her lips. But it ached through her cheeks, and the pressure in her chest grew and grew, like bubbles mounting in a shaken up soda. The urge fizzled up until she couldn't bottle it anymore, she held her breath and pinned her bottom lip between her teeth, but then at the same time as Will, she burst into laughter. Her shoulders shook beneath the jacket that Will had draped around her and tears stung her eyes.

The DS agents who formed a loose arc three or four strides away twisted around and gave her and Will a wary and somewhat disapproving look, head to toe and back again, like a teacher might give the middle school miscreants who inhabited the back row of class.

She bit down on her lower lip and covered her nose and mouth with the back of her hand as she fought for some kind of composure, and after a few hiccuped chortles, somehow she managed to stifle the laughter.

The silence that followed jittered with energy. She drew in a deep breath that shook through her lungs, and she tried to maintain a somewhat solemn expression whilst the flames engulfed the black walnut tree and the firemen doused it with foam. This was serious. She could have died. Will could have died. People—other than Kostov—could have died. It was no laughing matter.

But a second later, a snort broke through, and both her and Will's laughter erupted again.

DS gave them another tutting look—one that said they might have to separate her and Will in a minute—and then they turned their backs on them and shook their heads to themselves as they stared out across the carnage of the car park.

When their laughter had subsided into warm smiles, Elizabeth wiped her tears away with the knuckle of her forefinger, and then linked her arm—the non-lacerated left arm—through Will's.

At the gesture, Will turned to her. He raked his gaze over her, the prickle as prominent as the December chill when the breeze blew the heat of the flames in the opposite direction, and the air between them held poised, as though bracing itself in preparation of him saying something.

But no words came.

The gush of the foam spray and a fireman's bellowing shouts filtered through from the background.

Still nothing.

Then Will turned away to face the car park once more.

A moment elapsed in their bubble of strained yet contented silence. Then he squeezed her arm against his side. "After Mom and Dad died…I'm glad that we had each other."

Her smile softened, and she squeezed his arm in return. "Me too." Then she tilted her head away from his and tugged at his arm. "Even if you're kinda a pain in the ass."

He gave her an incredulous look. "Hey, I'm trying to be nice here."

"I know you are, but that's not us."

"I'll bear that in mind the next time you need someone to sew up your arm for you."

She dismissed that with a shake of the head. "One of the EMTs would have done it."

"And left you with a scar as thick as your thumb. That—" He motioned to her bandaged up arm. "—is artwork. Even Plastics wouldn't give you cleaner lines. Plus, you have the added benefit of not having to worry that I might sell my story to the press of how I was called upon to treat the secretary of state at the mental health facility where she's been hiding."

She shrugged. Her shoulder bumped against his. "If anyone asked, I'd just tell them I was here visiting you. Shouldn't be too hard to sell them on that."

His gaze bristled against her cheek, but she ignored it. Instead, she stared at the charcoal grey smoke that billowed above where the black walnut tree once stood.

She drew in a breath that rolled to the bottom of her lungs, steeling herself, and the bitterness of the smoke ached through her chest. "Actually, I've decided I'm going to come out with this publicly. Clear the air, so to speak. I don't want to live feeling like I need to hide this, and God knows I shouldn't have to." Her eyebrows raised for a moment, and her lips flinched at one corner. "Plus, if I don't, it'll only come out as oppo eventually anyway."

His gaze continued to prickle at her cheek. "You still thinking about running?"

"Maybe. Depending on the fallout."

He turned away again. "Well, I'm sure you've got a guy ready to spin it in your favour."

She snorted. "You're so cynical, you know that?"

"I like to think I have a realistic grasp on the shadow theatre that you call politics."

A few seconds passed, and then he looked to her. His gaze dragged up and down. "You do have a guy, don't you?"

Her eyes narrowed on him, and her mouth fell open, ready to deny it. What Mike had planned wasn't _spinning_ per se, it was just ensuring that the public appreciated her side of the story and understood the many positives in her seeking help and saw the bigger picture and...and...and...

She humphed, shook her head to herself, and returned to looking out over the car park.

Will's aura oozed with smug satisfaction, and he chuckled. The mourning doves that roosted on the top slat of the split-rail fence cooed along with him.

After a lull, he leant forward and brushed—or pretended to brush—some granules of glass from the ends of his khakis where the fabric had rucked at his ankles. His voice strained with his stretch. "For what it's worth, I think you should. Run."

She sent him a sideways glance. "I thought I didn't need your permission."

He straightened up. "I'm not giving you my permission, just my opinion."

She eyed him, and when she found something akin to sincerity lurking beneath his facade of nonchalance, she squeezed his arm again. "Thank you."

"No problem."

They settled back into silence. It was comfortable, at first. One of the ambulances parked on the gravel track pulled away with a grating roar, only to halt a few metres later with a screech of brakes and a flash of red taillights as it let the other one pull out too. From the foyer behind them came the sound of someone sweeping up glass, a mix of the brush against the linoleum and the tinkle of grains and shards surging into the dustpan. Voices buzzed over the DS agents' radios—situation normal, no threat anymore. But as time stretched, that comfort waned and the silence reminded her of the hush that greeted her each time that she returned to her empty room, along with the tug of loneliness that followed. She wished time would stop for a little while so that she could savour the moment of sitting next to Will and the companionship their silence held, and she wished time would speed up so that she could finally go home and silence would be a problem no more.

After a while, Will gave a stream of a sigh. His gaze had drifted to the burnt-out shell of his car; it was only mildly worse than the state of her car had been after he'd written it off back when they were kids. "Do you think, if I asked them nicely, one of the FBI guys would give me a lift back to DC, seeing as how some maniac they failed to catch fireballed my car?"

"That depends." Elizabeth jogged his shoulder. "Do you know how to ask nicely?"

"You're not the only one capable of employing a little diplomatic charm." He slipped his arm free from hers and then rose to his feet with a stretch. He turned back to face her, and half-squinted in the sunlight. "Are you sure you want to stay?"

She snorted. "No." Then she sobered. "But I still have some things I need to talk through."

He studied her for a moment, as though considering that. Then the pinch in his brow smoothed. He nodded to her bandaged right arm where it still rested atop her knees. "Keep that dressing in place for a couple of days before letting it breathe. But don't get those stitches wet, and don't catch them on anything, I don't want you messing up my handiwork."

"I know how to look after stitches, _Will_. It's not the first time—"

He raised his eyebrows. "That you've needed them? I know." He paused and let the words sink in like the saline solution had into her wound. "If you have a problem, call me. Otherwise I'll take them out next week." He shrugged. "You can think of it as your Christmas present."

"How thoughtful of you."

"Beats a wet/dry vac." His lips curled. When she scowled at him and opened her mouth ready to protest—_What was wrong with a wet/dry vac?_—he held up one hand to hush her, his fingers splayed. "Do you want me to pass anything on to Henry?"

She thought for a moment, and stared out through the watery sunlight that drenched the car park. The toppled black walnut tree and Kostov's car were now buried beneath a snow bank of firefighting foam. Then she remembered the night Henry had driven all the way there to be with her when she first checked in—_I love you, Elizabeth McCord, and you are not alone. No matter what the hecklers say, I love you and you are not alone_. She looked up at Will, a soft smiling playing at the corners of her lips. "Just tell him I might have fallen off a few cliffs and been hit by a few freak waves, but I'm still putting one foot in front of the other."

Will gave her a puzzled look. "Yeah, I was thinking something more along the lines of you're feeling better and you're not planning on leaving him, mentally or otherwise."

Her smile evaporated. It felt like shadows swept in all around her. "What?"

"I don't know quite what you do to that man, but pining doesn't even come close. It's like you've taken away his favourite toy." Then he smirked and lowered his gaze towards the waistband of her jeans in a suggestion. "Which I suppose you have."

She pulled a face at him. "Firstly, shut up. Secondly—" Her expression returned to the bewilderment of before. "—what do you mean, 'leaving him'? I'm not leaving him."

"Look at it from his point of view. You won't let the staff here talk to him—"

"Because he was obsessing and I didn't want him to worry."

"—you've not been using your phone privileges to call him—"

"Because it's hardly private, and do you have any idea how lonely it is being trapped here once you've hung up the phone on the outside world?"

"—you've not let him visit you, conjugally or otherwise—"

"Because who wants their husband seeing them at a mental health facility, for crying out loud? Plus, he's meant to be focusing on the kids. And once again: trapped and lonely."

"—not letting him be the one to help you—"

"Help me how?"

"—meanwhile you've been chatting to the drones at the State Department, having regular meetings with the White House Chief of Staff, and there was mention of some lunch dates too."

"Okay, that account's about as accurate and unbiased as Fox News." She held up one hand in a star, pushing back any further onslaught before Will could continue. "But you're not seriously telling me that Henry's jealous of Russell? I mean, come on."

Will gave a shrug that neither confirmed nor denied that interpretation. His eyes sparkled in amusement. Perhaps a glint of schadenfreude too.

Elizabeth stared vacantly across the car park, taking in none of the scene, whilst her mind boggled. "Well, that's both adorable and profoundly disturbing." She looked up at Will, a pinch in her brow. "Russell kept telling me everything was fine, so what the hell has been going on?"

"Well…" Will let out a long sigh as he sank down to sit beside her on the grey tartan blanket that padded the concrete ledge. He rested his forearms to his knees with his hands folded loosely in front of him, and he twisted to face her. The story of the last five weeks spilled out.

As she listened, Elizabeth closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. _Oh, Henry…_

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	86. Chapter Eighty-Four: paradox

**Chapter Eighty-Four**

**…****paradox.**

**Henry**

**Friday, 21st December, 2018**

**12:14 PM**

'_White House. Now._'

The three words of Russell's text message pulsed through Henry like a frantic mantra and governed his stride as he stormed along the corridors of the White House, the fronts of his blazer flapping open with each thud of his heart and footfall. _White House. Now. White House. Now. White House. Now._ Pods of staffers clustered here and there: at the ends of mahogany console tables, the legs of which were wrapped in gold and silver tinsel; next to the steel column radiators, with their chipped white paint and blossoming heat, that lined every wall; in front of the windows where the occasional flake of snow wafted against the glass before melting a line towards the ledge below, whilst above the powder-dusted grasses outside, spirals of white confetti swooned. The tumbling rise and fall of the staffers' chatter piped through the halls as they sipped from their takeaway coffee cups and shared warm yet vague smiles, which said that although they were happy to be there, they'd be happier still when the day had ended and they'd returned to the cosy warmth that could only be found with their loved ones at home.

Henry couldn't share in those smiles nor their carefree laughs, though, not when his thoughts were locked on the text message—_White House. Now._—and his loved one who wasn't at home.

"Adele." He strode into the outer part of Russell's office. "Russell sent a message—"

Adele looked up from the file that was splayed open on her desk, her fingers poised against the metal ruler she'd been using to guide her as she read the document line by line, and she peered up at Henry over the thick plastic rims of her glasses. "They're in the Oval Office. Russell said to send you straight through."

"Thank you." The words echoed after him as he strode on down the corridor.

After the bomb, he'd hoped—perhaps more selfishly than he cared to admit—that Elizabeth would come straight home. He needed to hold her and soak up her presence—from her smile to her scent, from her soft warmth to the rise and fall of her breath, from the cloudless skies of her eyes to the way her fingers laced perfectly with his own—just to know that she was safe and to prove to himself that he had more than memories of her to cling to. And he couldn't deny that the surge of relief that had washed over him like the warm waters of an Epsom salt bath when he'd opened the door late on Sunday evening to see Will standing there, safe and unharmed, was tinged with the bitter sting of disappointment to find that an FBI agent, not Elizabeth's detail, had dropped him off and that rather than her returning home with him, he had travelled there alone. Will's vague reassurances that '_Lizzie's fine_' apart from '_a few scratches_' and that she '_just has some things she needs to figure out_' before she was ready to come home offered Henry about as much comfort as any words could when they were spoken through a mouthful of three cheese pizza snatched from the grease-stained box on the kitchen counter. Though he needed her to be home, perhaps the fact remained that she still needed to be at the clinic, maybe even more so after the third attempt on her life in as many months.

Five days had passed since Will had shown up alone. Five days in which the security agencies had reassured them that the threat had now gone; five days in which the White House—much to the kids' relief—had freed them from their Secret Service detail; five days in which they'd settled into a somewhat normal routine at home. With one thing missing.

And now his cell phone held the text message, '_White House. Now._', and he found himself once again in the ice cold clutch of fear that something else had happened and maybe she—his Elizabeth—would never come home.

He ducked into the reception area outside the Oval Office. The assortment of chairs that pressed against the walls were deserted, petals of snow floated down outside the windows, and a murmur of voices drifted through the narrow gap between the office door and its frame.

Lucy did a double take and then smiled up at him from her desk. "Dr McCord, go straight through." She held her hand out towards the door, her smile fixed in place, taut yet warm.

Henry grasped the brass door handle, and was about to sweep the door open.

But then it struck him.

And he froze.

That laugh. The one that would rise above every last voice at a state dinner, no matter how packed the room. The one that resonated with something deep inside him, as though its frequency matched that of his soul. The one that he had promised himself on their one-and-a-halfth date he would coax from her every time they were together. Because it suited her. And with that laugh, every last fear melted, like the flakes of snow against the windows.

She had come home.

He eased the door open with his fingertips, and then hovered in the doorway, one hand steadying him against the frame. His breath stilled.

Elizabeth sat on the nearest of the two cobalt couches with her back turned to the door, her body pivoted to face Stevie who perched at the opposite end, her eyes gleaming with the smile that stretched across her face; whilst Conrad leant back against the edge of his desk, his arms folded across his chest, his chin dipped with his chuckle; and in front of the Christmas tree that thrust its red, white and blue bauble-spangled branches towards the walkway door, stood Russell, his hands braced against his hips beneath the open fronts of his suit jacket, his head bowed to disguise the inflection of his own smile.

A smile eased its way onto Henry's lips as Elizabeth continued to talk. Her laughter lit her voice and added that touch of gravel that he loved. "—and I swear to God this horse tries to bite him, probably because he's so on edge around her, because as it turns out, he's afraid of horses, has been ever since he was little and there was some incident at a dude ranch that his parents took him and his brothers to, which he probably should have mentioned, given that I keep dragging them all back to the horse farm. I mean, you think he could've—"

"Mom."

Elizabeth stopped and leant forward to squeeze Stevie's knee. "What is it, baby?"

Stevie raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes until their whites flared beneath the light cast from the chandelier overhead, and then she nudged her gaze towards Henry.

For a moment, Henry wished she hadn't. He could have listened to Elizabeth talk all day, especially when her tone alone was enough to tell him that she wasn't the Elizabeth who had spoken of all the ways she should have died before the true meaning of those words hit him and she fell into the shadows of their bedroom, but that she was _his_ Elizabeth again, the one who part of him had feared couldn't return—through no fault of her own, but because they'd missed that 'narrow window'. But then Elizabeth let go of Stevie's knee and twisted around to face the door, and as soon as her gaze landed on him, her smile dancing on in her eyes, he didn't know why he'd waited so much as one second to wrap her in his arms.

Except that now, with a clammy sweat gripping his palms as relentlessly as it had done when he'd marched across the quad to pick her up for their first date, and with a nervous energy shivering through every last muscle and binding him tight, he wasn't sure if he could move. Forming a coherent sentence might be a stretch too.

Elizabeth placed the book she had balanced in her lap onto the cushion of the couch, braced herself against her thighs and pushed herself up from the seat. She ambled around the end of the couch and padded across the carpet towards him; the silence in the room was as deep as the drifts of snow that mounted on the lawn outside, and it felt as though the hushed tread of her sneakers echoed.

His hand fell away from the door frame of its own accord, and somehow he managed to stumble a step further inside and push the door to behind him. His fingertips tingled. _God, this was stupid. _She was his wife, for crying out loud; he shouldn't be this nervous.

She sauntered to a stop in front of him. Her smile had softened, yet still it twinkled up at him.

His own smile had dwindled though. Perhaps he should have spent less time worrying that she wouldn't come home and more time preparing himself for the moment when she did. His fingers flexed at his side. He wanted to— . Or— . No, he wanted— . Maybe he should— . Or— .

God, he didn't know what to do.

The grandfather clock tolled out the silence that stagnated between them. _Clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk… _With each second that clunked by as faltering as a wagon wheel lurching into the mud-water potholes of a dirt track, his palms only sweated even more—not helped by the way that her eyes shone up at him with such hope, nor by the way that the longer he stared at her, the more it looked as though she held a wince on standby.

_Just say something. Anything. Seriously, anything at all._ His mouth hinged open, the flat of his tongue tasted the seconds that continued to lumber out, then—

"Hey." The word fell out in a breath.

She continued to stare up at him, the hope still alight—it felt as though she were waiting for something more. But when nothing came, she bit down on the inside of her cheek and her thumb nudged her wedding ring so that the gold gleamed at the edge of his vision. "Seriously, Henry. You haven't seen me in six weeks and the best you can do is 'Hey'?"

A blush threatened his cheeks, and as his chin dipped, a chuckle reverberated through his chest. Wholly unbidden. Half self-deprecation, half nerves.

With his gaze lowered, her thumb froze against her ring.

When he looked up at her again, her smile had grown more tentative still, as though beneath the surface, she were straining to hold it up, and as a result, the wince became evermore prominent. If she'd been expecting more than a 'hey' by way of greeting, she had certainly been expecting more than him avoiding her gaze when she called him out on it. Perhaps a riposte or a quote, or a quote in riposte. Yet still the words wouldn't come.

Conrad pushed himself away from the edge of the desk, and perhaps sensing the awkwardness between Henry and Elizabeth—Who couldn't? It was like someone had stretched tensile wires across the room, and so much as a flinch or even an ill-timed breath triggered an electric jolt.—he looked to Stevie and Russell. "I think I could use some fresh air, clean out the cobwebs."

Stevie stared wide-eyed up at Conrad for all of two seconds, and then taking the hint, she rose from her seat and smoothed her palms down the skirt of her navy blue dress as she did so.

But Russell's brow furrowed in disbelief. "It can't be more than thirty degrees out there, and that's not factoring in windchill. Plus, it's snowing." He swept one hand towards the walkway door, its net curtains as white as the blanket of snow that cushioned the lawn beyond. "And I hate snow."

Conrad gave him a firm look. "Then grab your coat, Russell, and don't stray from the walkway."

Russell grumbled. Something about snow being a deathtrap, a blight on the US economy, and utterly pointless to boot. But he filed out after Stevie and Conrad anyway, and then flipped up his collar and huddled his suit jacket around him as his silhouette loitered beyond the gauze veil that stretched across the door.

The bitter chill from outside along with stinging-sweet scent of snow unfurled through the room and lingered on even after the door had juddered into its frame. The gust, and the silence that it ushered in, made the toll of the grandfather clock heavier and more absolute somehow, like the peal that echoes through the blackened streets and summons worshipers to Midnight Mass.

Henry's heart thudded against his ribs in an attempt to match.

Elizabeth had unhooked the reading glasses from the neckline of her blue plaid shirt, and she bowed her head as she stared down at them and rubbed her thumbs against the frames. Her hair had swept forward on one side, and it fell in a shimmering curtain that ached to be tucked behind her ear, whilst pinprick flecks of rusted red marked her face—scratches scabbed but not yet healed.

Henry's fingers itched where they hung loose at his sides. He wanted to brush back her hair, lace his fingers through the silky-soft strands and draw her close so that he could press feather-light kisses to each one of those cuts. But he wasn't sure if she'd want him to. Perhaps it would have been okay if he'd done that straight away, but as the awkwardness stretched, it felt like maybe they weren't even looking at the same book let alone the same page, and he didn't want to misread the situation. And so he watched her instead as his chest grew tighter and tighter, his heart a knot at the centre, and he wasn't entirely convinced he wouldn't wake up in a moment and find himself alone again in the shadows of their bedroom.

Elizabeth's thumbs stilled against the frames. She looked up at him, and proffered his reading glasses. The hope in her eyes had dimmed, and the smile on her lips had turned pained.

He looked to the glasses, and then to her. "You came back."

"I did." Her eyebrows arched, adding emphasis to her words, and she attempted to widen her smile, but it turned into more of a grimace.

He took the glasses from her. The same rusted red dots that marked her face streaked the back of her hand too, only these ones strung into lines, like stars of a constellation linked. He hooked the plastic arm over the front of his shirt, and then stood facing her, still at a loss for what to say.

Silence throbbed between them. The grandfather clock _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonked_; a gust of wind whistled a draught through the gaps around the windows and ruffled the net curtains; a telephone trilled in the office outside.

Russell, Conrad and Stevie huddled on the walkway, and they chatted away whilst Conrad pointed to something on the lawn and the snow flurried down in flakes as thick as shredded cotton candy.

Elizabeth's smile-grimace withered into nothing, and her chin dipped again. She shook her head to herself, and the curtain of her hair quivered and caught a ripple of the soft yellow light.

Henry's mouth opened and closed. He swallowed. The words came out thick, and they dragged as though smothered in black treacle. "How…how are you?"

A flash of a smile lit her lips as she met his gaze. Her eyes sparkled. "Good." She tilted her head to one side, and her gaze drifted away over his shoulder. "I mean, still very much a work in progress—" She returned her gaze to his. "—but good." She paused, and then reached as though to grasp his hand, but her fingertips merely brushed against his fingers before they retreated again instead. The corners of her lips tweaked into a half-wince. "How about you?"

He nodded, her touch still tingling through his skin, cold and warm all at once. "Good."

The word hung in the air. It should have loosened his tongue and enabled more words to follow, but instead it felt as though it carved out a hollow into which more silence spilled.

He studied her, looking for what to say—anything to say.

The seconds ached. The grandfather clock _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonked_; Conrad's chuckle rolled through from the walkway and melded with the lilt of Stevie's laugh; Lucy's voice drifted through the gap between the door and its frame.

No words emerged, only clouds in Elizabeth's eyes—overcast skies. Then she pinched them shut, and with a derisive huff (self- or otherwise), she shook her head.

He stepped towards her, reached for her.

But at the same time she turned away.

He stopped.

She dug circles into her brow with the tips of her fingers. Stilled. Took a deep breath that shook through her. And then let her hand fall away. A moment or two passed. Then she clutched her hips and turned her chin so that—at a guess—she stared towards the walkway door. Perhaps she'd rather be out there with Conrad and Russell instead. (Stevie's silhouette had disappeared.)

Henry eased a step closer. "I'm pleased to see you."

"Henry…" She shook her head again. The ends of her hair trembled. Then she turned to him, and hugged her arms loosely across her chest. Her gaze drifted, perhaps to avoid his. "You know, I've had warmer welcomes from wannabe dictators who've just been told I'm planning on cutting off all financial aid… And even their vocabulary extends beyond monosyllabic words."

He chuckled. Wholly unbidden. Half self-deprecation, half nerves—once again.

The pinch in her brow said that wasn't the right response.

He closed the gap between them, bringing them toe to toe, and he smoothed his palms down her upper arms and over the curves of her elbows.

But she flinched away from the touch, as though stung.

He stopped. His smile evaporated in sync to the strum that ached out from his heart. _So much for holding her, let alone soaking up her presence_. He scruffed his hand over the hair at the back of his head instead and then let it fall empty at his side. He gave a stilted shrug, and his lips twinged at one corner. "I just wasn't expecting to see you here, that's all. Russell sent a text saying, 'White House. Now.', and I was worried that something had happened to you—again—but then I heard you laughing and I saw you and I was surprised—good surprised."

She pinned her bottom lip between her teeth at one side, the way she did when she was too anxious to hide the fact that she was anxious. Another shake of the head.

"Look…do you think we could start again?"

_Clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk._

She continued to stare towards the exit, still worrying her lip between her teeth. If it weren't for the grandfather clock keeping count of the seconds, forever could have passed.

She took a deep breath and her shoulders hunched to her ears. "I don't know." With her sigh, her shoulders fell. Then she met his eye, and a small smile broke through. "If we were to start _again_ again, that could take a while, and I'm kinda worried that if I leave Russell freezing his ass off standing around out there for much longer, he'll start coming up with initiatives to promote global warming in the vain hope it might actually lead to less snow."

He gave a huff of a laugh. "Have fun trying to explain that paradox to him."

Beyond the door, Russell tugged on a black woollen overcoat—presumably what Stevie had been sent to fetch before she returned to her work or to grab him a coffee that he probably shouldn't be drinking but would attempt to justify because of the cold—whilst flurries of snow twisted and tumbled through the white stone pillars and whipped onto the walkway.

Elizabeth followed Henry's gaze, staring over her shoulder. She murmured, "I'm sure I will."

Henry rested his hands on her hips, waited for her to flinch or push him away, and when she didn't, he brushed his thumbs back and forth over the patches above the juts of her hipbones, ruffling the cotton of her plaid shirt as he did so. A smile dawned across his lips. It was cheesy, no doubt, but when had cheesy ever failed him before? "Then how about we start here, with these monosyllabic words?"

She turned to him, and looked up at him expectantly, almost puzzled.

"I missed you. A lot. A lot a lot. More than you can know. I'm glad that you came home, and I'm glad that you feel good. And I love—"

But as he spoke, pain seeped into her eyes, as though the clouds they held had started to rain grey sleet. She bowed her head. Her hair shivered. "Henry, don't."

_Uh… _His mind fumbled over silence. He sought sense where none was to be found. "What?"

She lifted her chin and looked up at him. A wall of ice had risen up in her eyes.

He frowned and his hands fell away from her hips. "Why not?"

But she just stared up at him, her expression a mask, and as she did, the walkway door swung open and a gasp of bitter air flooded the room.

Russell and Conrad bustled inside. Russell pushed up the sleeve of his black overcoat, the wool now adorned with flecks of melting snow, and he frowned at his watch. "Bess, we need to get a move on if we're going to do this. I don't want to get caught up in the snow, or wait around until the liquid lunchers start spilling out of the bars."

Elizabeth continued to stare up at Henry. Her lips parted. Her throat bobbed.

Henry frowned back at her. _What on earth was going on?_

"Bess?" Russell said.

A second longer, and then she broke their gaze. She cleared her throat. "Sure."

She slipped past Henry, causing him to stumble aside, and she grabbed what appeared to be Will's green-grey jacket from the armrest of the couch. She folded it over her left arm and then faced Conrad, who had once again taken his perch against the front edge of his desk. She nodded to him. "Mister President."

"Madam Secretary." Conrad gave her an equally formal nod in reply, though a smile snuck through in a sly glimmer. Then he tipped his forefinger at her. "And I'll be holding you to that promise about NSC meetings. One single complaint…"

Elizabeth backed towards the door that Russell had wedged open with one foot, whilst he held a cell phone in either hand, his gaze flitting from one screen to the other as his thumb tapped away at one of the keypads, and she held her arms out to the sides. "See, and here I was thinking that that conversation never happened."

Conrad huffed. "Take care, Bess. I'll see you next week."

"If not sooner." She turned and strode out into the waiting area, leaving Henry in a daze.

Russell paused his tapping for half a second and shot Henry a look. "Henry…" He jerked his head towards the doorway. "Are you coming or are you planning on hanging around here all afternoon?"

Henry hesitated, and then gave Conrad a nod. He might have mumbled Conrad's name or a quick 'Mister President', he didn't know. And then he wandered past the abandoned chairs of the waiting area and Lucy's warm yet taut smile, and into the corridor outside.

On the opposite side of the hall and with her back to Henry, Elizabeth stood in front of one of the radiators, its white paint flaked away to reveal the rusted steel beneath. Henry joined her. She didn't acknowledge him though, just continued to stare out through the window. The snow on the concrete path outside had already turned to grey-brown sludge with the Secret Service agents traipsing past. Although the chatter of staffers, the trills of telephones and the judders of inkjet printers still filtered through the halls, as Henry and Elizabeth stood side by side, it felt as though the silence that had stagnated between them before now surrounded them in their own awkward bubble and trapped them from the normality outside.

When the backs of their hands brushed, Henry froze.

A second later, Elizabeth's fingers plucked at his. Still she stared out of the window. Her voice lowered to less than a murmur. "Henry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

"Then how did you mean it?"

She shook her head. Her voice thickened. "I just wanted to talk to you first."

"We were talking. I tried to tell you that I love you, and you said 'don't'."

Her head bowed. Her hair swept between them.

"Is this what you've been trying to figure out?"

She shot him a sideways glance. "What?"

"Will said you were trying to figure some things out. By that did you mean 'us'?"

She stared at him. Something akin to alarm lit the whites of her eyes.

"Bess." Russell's voice came from behind.

She shook her head and murmured, "I'll talk to you at home."

Russell swooped in on her opposite side, one of the cell phones he had been studying held out to her. "This is for you, seeing as you 'being fine' resulted in water damage to the last one. I'll make sure all the key people have your new number, so you needn't worry about that. No doubt Mike'll be in contact regarding that interview. And in the interest of checks and balances, those first two speed dials are non-negotiable." He leant back and shot Henry a look behind her. "Sorry, Henry, you'll have to make do with third place."

Henry continued to study Elizabeth, whilst she stuffed the cell phone into the front pocket of her jeans and avoided his gaze. His jaw tightened. "Somehow I don't think that'll be a problem."

Elizabeth's gaze darted up. The whites of her eyes flared.

"Good." Russell clasped his hands together in front of him, almost a clap. He looked from Elizabeth to Henry and back again. "Shall we?"

Elizabeth turned her back on the window, but she made no move to leave. She raked her fingers through her hair and left them lodged in her roots, whilst her gaze whistled away into the distance. Her lips parted a second or two before she spoke. "I forgot something." She swallowed, and as she hugged Will's jacket tighter against her stomach, her gaze drifted to Russell. "Give me a minute, and I'll meet you in your office."

Russell's cell phone bleeped, and he fished it out of his coat pocket. "Sure." He frowned down at the screen and stepped away from her and Henry. "But don't take too long. I've still got a country to run, even if everybody else has checked out for the holidays."

Russell strode off down the corridor, a thud with each step, whilst Henry and Elizabeth stood trapped in their bubble of silence. Time inside it stilled.

Henry wished they had the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ to echo through the hush and measure the seconds now. He stared out of the window. Elizabeth's presence hung at the edge of his vision whilst outside the tufts of snow drifted down, white and pure, to melt into the trampled murk of sludge that clogged the concrete slabs of the path. He waited for her to say something—anything, anything at all—whilst at the same time, some part of him told him that she'd already said enough and that he should just go. He'd thought she had been pleased to see him. She had looked up at him with such hope. But then there was that wince, and that flinch, and the nudging of her wedding ring, and the weeks and weeks of silence.

"I should…" She tilted her head towards the Oval Office.

He frowned. Then—

_Oh_. He gave a self-derisive huff. He'd thought the 'forgotten something' was an excuse for them to talk. He needled his brow with his fingertips—_How stupid._—and then he let his hand fall to his side. He gave her a bitter-tinged smile. "Sure. Well, I guess I'll see you at home."

He turned and walked away.

But before he had made it a single stride, something grabbed hold of his hand.

He froze and looked at her, and then to the knot of their fingers. Will's jacket had slipped down her arm to her wrist and half-covered the bridge between them.

She squeezed tight.

He looked her in the eye.

She looked back. Cloudless skies. "Henry, I love you."

He'd wanted her to get better. He'd wanted her to come home. He'd wanted to hear her say those three words. And now that she had? He was reminded of the night when she had spoken of all the ways in which she should have died before the true meaning of those words hit him and she fell into the shadows of their bedroom, and how as she curled up on her side beneath the covers of their bed and he'd begged her to seek help before he'd warned her that he would make the call himself, she had told him she would never forgive him and she'd threatened to leave him if he did. At the time he'd said he could live with that, so long as she was well.

It wasn't a lie. He just never thought it would come true.

She let go of his hand, caught hold of Will's jacket, and walked away towards the waiting area and the Oval Office beyond. Nothing made sense. Her behaviour was as much a paradox as global warming leading to increased snowfall. But as he stood alone in the White House now, he found himself gripped by a fear far more chilling than before. Elizabeth had come back. But what if she didn't want to be _his_ Elizabeth anymore?

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	87. Chapter Eighty-Five: where they stood

**Chapter Eighty-Five**

**…****where they stood.**

**Elizabeth**

**12:44 PM**

It was a mistake. She should have made it clear to Russell that she intended on seeing Henry later at home. She should have given Henry his glasses and a peck on the cheek and told him that she had a few things to sort out at work first. She should have diffused the jaw-achingly awkward tension before Conrad excused himself, Russell and Stevie, and left the two of them alone. Then she wouldn't have been forced to say 'don't' just to put a stopper on things before either of them got hurt.

Elizabeth halted in front of the door to the Oval Office. She thought about glancing over her shoulder and catching a glimpse of Henry before he left. But who would that help? He'd probably stalked off already anyway. That huff. That bitter smile. That, '_Well, I guess I'll see you at home_'. Her fault, but still…

Her gaze drifted up to the crown moulding above the door instead. Spidering cracks fractured the plaster. She drew in a breath that unfurled down to the base of her lungs and then rolled up to the apex until every last part of her chest ached and burned. She steeled herself. _Compartmentalise_.

She rapped her knuckles against the wood—three sharp taps—and then grasped the cool bronze handle and pushed open the door before Conrad had the chance to reply. The knock was only a courtesy, really. They both knew she'd be back.

Conrad leant against the front edge of his desk, the fingers of one hand curled around the lip of the stained oak, whilst with the other hand, he held out the book he had given her and that she'd left on the cushions of the sofa—the English translation of _La Disparition_. With the snow tumbling down beyond the windows behind him, the flakes as thick and as delicate as the swirls of cherry blossom had been when she'd hurried back to that chipped white bench thirty-odd years ago, it felt as though she were living both the past and the present at once, as though the path of her life had looped back on itself and ran alongside where she had walked decades before.

She padded along behind the couch. The surrounding hush of the room, broken only by the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the grandfather clock, elevated the faint tread of her sneakers against the carpet. The quiet spoke of familiarity and comfort—a balm compared to the silence that had jarred and bristled and strained between her and Henry just minutes before. She laid Will's jacket over the back of the couch as she walked past. The coarse green-grey fabric clashed with the velveteen cobalt.

Conrad's smile echoed the hint of her own as she took the book from him—a nod to their shared memory. Back then it would have seemed impossible that they would be where they stood today, he as the president and she as his secretary of state, and in some ways it still did. Was it odd that she missed the girl who had sat cross-legged on the bench that day—so much life before her to discover, so naïve, so eager, so certain—in the same way she might miss a long-lost friend?

She perched against the arm of the couch, and for a long moment—a minute, maybe more—she stared down at the book cover, with its jumble of 'e's that swarmed to spell out 'A Void' in the gaps that they left between them. A presence out of the absence. It came with a bittersweet tug, like the strum of a chord long forgotten. _After all, you can't write Elizabeth without the letter 'e'_. She loved that book, but at the same time she wished she'd never gone through the loss that enabled it to speak to her, that she could read it as just a word game and not see it for something deeper. But then again, if she could, then she wouldn't be the Elizabeth she was today.

When she looked up at Conrad, she held the book to her chest and twisted it around to show him a flash of the deep purple cover. "I wanted to thank you for this." She paused, holding his gaze, and then returned the book to her lap, her fingers wrapped around its spine. The flex in her muscles tweaked at her stitches. "It means a lot to me. It means even more to me that you not only heard the ramblings of a twenty-something-year-old girl geeking out over her love of language and math but that you took the time to listen to her, and that almost thirty years on you still remember."

Conrad's eyes glimmered. "Let's just say you made quite the impression."

"Good or bad?" she quipped. It didn't ask for an answer.

With an ache seeping out from her cut and through her arm, she placed the book down beside her on the armrest, and then folded her hands against her knees before she met his eye once more. "I also wanted to thank you for being a friend and refusing to reinstate me before, for believing in me and not giving away my job despite Russell's well-meaning advice, and for having faith in me and reinstating me now. At the Company, we always used to say that we were helping the world in ways that people would never know about. I like to think that's true of friendships too." She turned her head from side to side, and the ends of her hair tickled her jaw. "There are many ways in which you've helped me become who I am today, not just in my job but as a wife and as a mother. And although we all have regrets in life and things we would like to change, I wanted you to know that, for me, meeting you that day at UVA and you recruiting me isn't one of them, despite what I might have said when you visited the other week." She stilled and looked him in the eye. "You gave me a home at the CIA; you introduced me to colleagues who became more like family to me; in a world where I once felt I had no control, you enabled me to make a difference—a real difference; and what started as a conversation on a bench at college has turned into one of my longest and most valued friendships. I'm grateful for that." Then she tilted her head to one side, and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "And for the ginger snaps."

Conrad gave a huff of a laugh.

Her smile widened. "Mostly for the ginger snaps." She eased herself away from the armrest, and her smile turned a touch awkward, a touch tentative, asking for his permission.

When he pushed himself away from the edge of the desk and opened his arms to her, she met him with her embrace. Her eyes slipped shut, and she clung tight, just for a moment. The hint of Old Spice rolled through her like her father's scent once had. "Thank you, Conrad."

"You're welcome, Bess. I'm just glad you're feeling like yourself again." He ended the hug with a pat to her shoulder blade. "You know, NSC meetings aren't half as interesting without your take."

She gave a 'hah' and stepped back. "I'm not sure Russell would agree." She turned away, tucked her hair behind her ear on one side, and gathered up the book and Will's jacket from the couch. "And it sounds as though he's been terrorising my staff while I've been away."

"All in the name of keeping you safe, I'm sure."

She shook her head to herself, folded the jacket over her less-injured arm, and turned to face him. She kept her expression deadpan. "Well, just so long as they don't wind up needing therapy."

He arched his eyebrows at her.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, but her smirk crept through anyway.

He shared in her smile for a moment, and then his expression sobered. He leant back against the desk again and folded his arms across his chest, the look in his eyes penetrating. "Not wishing to pry, Bess…but do I need to ask about you and Henry?"

Her smile withered. She tried to sustain it, but it couldn't have been any better than bitter, so she let it slip away. She cleared her throat, and hugging Will's jacket tighter to her side, she turned her back on him and paced towards the door. "You know, I wanted to thank you for keeping an eye on Stevie as well. It's good to know she's got people looking out for her."

"We all need someone." The words lingered, along with the prickle of his gaze that goaded the nape of her neck as sharp as the whistle of the breeze through the windows. The toll of the grandfather clock in the lull lent the words extra heft.

Though, of course, needing someone or wanting someone didn't guarantee that you'd have someone.

"Bess… One more thing before you go."

She halted, and twisted to face him. Her breath stilled as she waited.

He studied her, his brow furrowed. "How did you know? That day."

Her eyebrows raised. "That you were CIA?"

He gave a nod. His gaze remained heavy on her, ready to catch the slightest flinch.

"You mean aside from the abundance of tweed?" She pinned the inside of her cheek between her teeth, and reined back her smirk.

He huffed, and his chin dipped as he fought to keep the smile from his face.

She could have said goodbye again, and left it at that—again. The deflection had always felt easier; perhaps it always would. Some things never change. But returning to that chipped white bench beneath the cherry blossom tree to fetch a book she'd deliberately left behind just to let Conrad know, '_I've got a pretty good feeling you're from the CIA_', led her to a job offer, to a home, to colleagues who became family, to ginger snaps, to motherhood, to a horse farm, to State, to where she stood today, so perhaps she should give him that small truth that had started it all. God knew there had been enough lies, half-truths and avoidance of late.

She ambled over and rested her hand atop the back of the couch, her fingers arched against the cushion. Her watch—the replica of her father's—peeked out from beneath the cuff of her blue plaid shirt. She stared down at it. If she listened hard enough, she could almost hear the _tick…tick…tick…_ beneath the grandfather clock's _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk_. Not quite in sync.

She tapped her fingertips against the cushion—once, twice—and then formed a fist and dared herself to meet Conrad's gaze. "The moment you tell someone that you were orphaned, there's this look of fear that flashes across their eyes. It's as though they think that your grief might somehow be contagious, and they need to pull away. If not physically, then emotionally. That fear then dissolves into pity, which is worse in a way, because then they look at you as though your loss makes you less than human. Then they try to disguise it, of course, but it all happens too fast. And that just leaves the awkward silence, because no one knows what to say in response to someone else's grief." She paused. Her gaze drifted for a moment, towards the petals of snow that tumbled down beyond the pillars of the colonnade. Then she returned to him. "When I told you about my parents, there was nothing—no fear, no pity, no silence—despite the fact you'd been responsive throughout the rest of our conversation. Which meant either you were phenomenally good at hiding your reactions, or you already knew what had happened, even though we'd never met. Either way, the CIA seemed a pretty solid guess, and I didn't have anything to lose. As my mother always said, '_No harm in asking_.' So I did." She shrugged. "And when I did, the look on your face gave away everything."

So, grief: that's why she stood where she stood today.

She nodded to him, and backed towards the door, whilst he watched her with a hint of that stunned look he'd worn that day. "Take care, Conrad. I'll see you next week."

* * *

**Jay**

**1:16 PM**

"I'm still getting a lot of questions about the secretary." Daisy's fingers flared where they wrapped around her coffee mug atop the conference room desk; a ripple of yellow light reflected off the lacquer of black nail polish. "I mean, one benefit of having an assassin on the rampage was that I could at least sell the idea of her being in a safe house, but now—"

"Speaking of people on the rampage." Blake's voice cut in.

Jay swivelled around in his chair at the head of the table to cast Blake a glance where he sat at the desk in the corner behind. Then, as Blake stared out through the doorway of the conference room with a look of mild terror, Jay swivelled in the opposite direction, towards the main hall.

Russell Jackson stormed along the aisle between the rows of desks. Clumps of melted snow flecked his black woollen overcoat, the fronts of which agitated with each thundering step. He swooped into the conference room, his brow furrowed with his scowl—"Her office. Now."—and arced straight around and through the side entrance into the secretary's office.

Jay's gaze darted from Kat along to Daisy and across to Matt—_What on earth was going on now?_—whilst Daisy leant into her elbows atop the desk, locked her glower on Matt, and hissed, "What have you done this time?"

Matt drew in his chin, and his chair rolled back an inch in sync. A nervous chuckle escaped him. That laughter faded though as he glanced around the others, looking for support, only to find them all staring back at him expectantly. His expression sobered to a touch shy of hurt. "Hey. Why does everyone automatically assume this has something to do with me?"

"Oh, I don't know." Daisy shook her head to herself, so that the flicked ends of her hair swayed at her shoulders, and she pushed herself up from her seat. "How 'bout history?"

Kat gave a mouth shrug, tilted her head to one side, and then paused for a sip of coffee, her gaze faraway. "You do have a pretty solid track record."

"Statistics," Blake said, through the last mouthful of panini and then dusted off his hands. He buttoned up his blazer and stepped towards the secretary's office.

At the same time, Russell's shout echoed through. "Some time today would be nice."

Blake faltered, and his expression turned to a grimace. "Anyone else feel like they're about to enter a slaughterhouse run by Hannibal Lecter Inc.? No…? Just me?"

Jay braced himself against the desk and eased up from his seat. _Just what they needed on a Friday, and the Friday before a holiday weekend no less. _He followed the others through, and clapped Matt's shoulder as they went. "Ten dollars says we'll be working Christmas."

Matt cast a glance over his shoulder and murmured, "At least he doesn't have props this time. It kinda makes you miss MSec and her landmines."

Jay's brow furrowed into a bemused frown. "There's so much wrong with that sentence."

"You know what I mean."

Jay pushed the door to behind him. It clunked into its frame. He joined the others in a staggered arc behind the chairs in front of the secretary's desk, and he gripped the wooden top rail of one of the chairs. Russell tossed his overcoat onto the other one, and then perched against the edge of the desk and folded his arms across his chest. They waited.

The clock on the mantlepiece _tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…tocked _into the silence. Snow filtered down beyond the net curtains that veiled the windows; it made that silence deeper somehow, a blanket to smother all other sound.

Russell eyed each of them in turn, his look razor-edged.

Jay's fingers fluttered against the top rail, and his shoulders gave a shimmy as he stared back at Russell. "Any chance you're going to tell us what this is about? Or do we have to guess again?"

Russell's gaze landed on Jay. "This…" His voice dragged. Then he paused, and shot a glance towards the doorway behind them. "…is about—"

"Hey, sorry about that. I got caught at the elevator." A familiar, but breathless, voice came from the doorway, causing them all to twist around in unison. The secretary stood just inside the wooden archway. She wore jeans, a blue plaid shirt, and a nervous smile. "So…what did I miss?"

There was a second's lull, like the stunned silence that comes before the applause at the end of a speech. Jay's mind reeled like a spinning top teetering to a stop. Then—

"Hey! Look. MSec's back." Matt strode across the room, the fronts of his suit jacket flapping, and before the secretary had a chance to brace herself, he swept her into a fierce hug, swamping her in his arms. "It's good to see you, ma'am."

"Hey, Matt. It's good to see you too." A chuckle lit the secretary's voice and radiated from her expression. She patted Matt's back. "And thank you again for the hodu-gwaja."

"You're welcome." Matt drew away and grinned at her, and he nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Then he grasped hold of her by the upper arms, just below the shoulders, and frowned down at her sneakers. "Hey. What's with the laces?"

The secretary looked down at her sneakers too. Wiry, black dress shoe laces had taken the place of the flat, white cotton laces you'd expect with a pair of sneakers like that. She looked up at Matt again. Her eyebrows raised a fraction, her smile a touch more tentative. "Long story."

She laid her hand against Matt's elbow, and stepped around him. She smiled up at Blake and opened her arms to him as he swooped in for a hug as well. "Hey, Blake." She clung to him, her fingers splayed across the back of his blazer. "God, I missed you guys." And then she embraced Kat and Daisy too, whilst Jay continued to hover near the chairs in front of the desk.

When she came to a stop in front of Jay, she looked up at him expectantly, a smile playing at the corners of her lips. Red-brown scratches disrupted the veneer of her foundation. "Hug? No hug? I don't want to get hit by a harassment suit first day back."

Jay gave an awkward chuckle, and his gaze dipped. Matt's words circled through his mind—_If you give up on her now, it won't matter whether she gets better or not, because the damage will be done. The trust will be gone_. They came with a sting of shame. Perhaps if she knew all the things he had said about her, she wouldn't deem him worthy of a hug, let alone trusting him as 'her guy'.

The silence stretched. She drew his gaze back up to her with a tap against his elbow, and then she tilted her head towards the blue-and-yellow-striped couch. She skirted around the edge of the mahogany coffee table, and took a seat, smoothing her palms down her jeans as she did so. She clutched her knees and waited for him to join her. Her smile had softened, but not faded.

A chill ruffled through the window and the net curtain behind the couch as he sank down onto the cushion next to her. He cast a glance towards the others, who had clustered in a circle near the doorway, whilst Russell frowned down at his cell phone where he lurked in the shadows just beyond—the white glow lit his expression. Then he looked to the secretary. "Ma'am…I feel I ought to tell you…when Russell told us that you were…" _Unstable? Suicidal? At a mental health clinic?_ He left the silence to do the elaborating. "I didn't exactly act in a way that was supportive, or respectful, and some of the things that I said…"

She gave him a look as though taken aback, but the sarcasm embedded within it was almost as deep as that found in her tone. "You seriously mean to tell me that you—Jay Whitman—got thrown into an impossible situation, acted all pessimistic and cynical, before having an epiphany, and then knuckling down and pulling through right when I needed you to?"

He hung his head and gave a self-deprecating chuckle. Then he looked up and met her with an almost wince. "Why, exactly, did you hire me again?"

Her shoulders hunched to her ears, and she shook her head. "Technically, I didn't. I just kept you on and then promoted you."

She met him with a wide smile and laid a hand on his knee, just briefly, before she returned it to the other one in her lap. "Look, we've got the dreamers, the blue-sky thinkers, the idealists, but we also need people who know where the box is and can rein in those crazy plans and give them the structure they need in order for us to pull them off. Sure, you have a tendency to grumble about things at first, but once you get over that and find inspiration, you do amazing work. It's part of your process. Plus, I don't want to be surrounded by a bunch of yes-men who never question my judgment and who are too scared to challenge me."

"With respect, ma'am, there's a big difference between questioning your policies or strategies and questioning you as a person, not to mention taking up an issue with you directly versus talking behind your back. It's not exactly what I'd call professional."

"Well, I question myself every day, especially at the moment, so I'll give you a free pass on that." Then she cocked her head to one side. "Plus, you did witness me yelling at my brother to wake up from his coma and almost launching myself at him, so if you didn't question my judgment, in all honesty, I'd probably question your judgment just a teeny bit." Her smile held steady for a moment, and then stained with a hint of pity. She rested her hand on the cushion between them. Darker red-brown scratches intersected the tendons of the back of her hand. "I heard about your situation with Chloe."

"Oh?" His own smile foundered, and his gaze flitted to Matt, who at the same time glanced back over his shoulder. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second.

The secretary twisted around to follow their exchange. Her voice lowered, her tone flecked with a touch more gravel. "Don't blame him. I coaxed it out of him when I was trying to check what Russell's been up to. And besides, he means well."

She pivoted back to face Jay. Her gaze locked on his. "I wanted you to know that while of course I would love nothing more than for you to stay on at State, if you need to go, that's no problem, and there'll be no hard feelings—I promise. In fact, I've got some contacts out in California and I'll pull every string there is to get you a job out there. Not that you'd need me to—anyone would be lucky to have you—but I'm just saying, the offer's there if you want it."

Jay bowed his head and looked to his hands where they were folded in the space between his knees. He pushed back the part of him that pointed out that he'd never wanted to go to California anyway and the question of what that said about him as a father, and he met her with the glimmer of a smile instead. "And miss out on a McCord White House?" He wrinkled his nose and drew in his chin. "No way."

She gave a huff of a laugh. "Well, we'll see about that." The hint of evasion said that she wasn't exactly opposed to the idea, despite all that had happened. It was a change from the outright denials of before. Then her expression sobered again, and her gaze sharpened on him. "But if you're sure about staying, I meant what I said when I took you on as my chief of staff. I'll do whatever I can to make it work for you and for Chloe. If you need extra vacation to go out there and visit, or more flexibility when Chloe comes to stay, or if you need to block out an hour each evening for contact over Skype. Whatever it is, just let me know, and I'll make it happen."

He bowed his head again, humbled. Perhaps he was wrong to doubt her, or perhaps that _was_ just part of his process—a necessary step in getting him to where he stood today—but either way, Matt was right when he'd said that she was stronger than he gave her credit for, and he knew now what his atonement would be: to ensure that the American public saw it. That, and that it wasn't just a McCord White House that was worth fighting for, because it went beyond the politics—it was about the woman who embodied the principles that would stand at the heart of it.

He looked up at her with a small smile. "Thank you, ma'am. I really appreciate it."

"No problem." She beamed back at him. "Now, do I get that hug or not?"

He shrugged, as though it didn't bother him either way. "Sure. Why not?"

* * *

**Elizabeth**

**3:15 PM**

"Hello?" Elizabeth's voice echoed out through the lower level of the house. "Anybody home?"

She hovered next to the console table in the entrance hall. Her reflection hung in the mirror beside her and it floated in the darkened panes of glass in the study door.

She waited.

Nothing.

She crept towards the living room, step by tentative step, the straps of her bag clutched in her left hand, the pad of her thumb pressed to the rough seam of the leather. All the lights were dimmed, and the snow-bright glow that flooded in through the windows made the rooms feel cavernous. Or perhaps the effect came from being away for so long—a loss of the cosy closeness that made a house a home, warmth stripped from the architecture.

She made it as far as the bottom of the stairs, and then paused. "Henry?"

Without any decorations or the gaud of flashing lights, the Christmas tree wedged into the corner of the living room looked lifeless, a shadow of what it ought to be, and it made the room feel more gloomy than had they gone without a tree altogether.

She waited.

Nothing.

Her grip on the straps of the bag tightened, and her nails curled into the leather. "Henry, if you're here and you're not talking to me, then that's fine—well, it's not fine because I need to talk to you—but please can you just say 'yes' or 'no', or cough?" Her voice lowered to a mutter. "Or kick something?"

Outside, a car slushed through the wet-melt of snow. The sound drifted into the distance and gave way to the drone of the refrigerator that buzzed through from the kitchen. Though the air in the house held the scent of home—enriched with the waft of pine—it felt sharper and less familiar somehow, and it reminded her more of the house they'd spent their first weeks and months in DC living in, rather than the home it had become over the years and that she'd left behind six weeks ago.

She waited.

Nothing.

Her heart stung with a bitter disappointment. It punctured a hole into which a loneliness deeper than that which she had found in her single room at the clinic flooded, and in the vast emptiness of the shell-house around her, that loneliness only expanded. At least at the clinic she could comfort herself with thoughts of home, at least at the clinic she could play out her reunion with Henry in her mind, at least at the clinic she could fantasise the happily-ever-after that she wanted.

She could have. She hadn't though. Not when she had found her mind weighed down with the wisps of worries and snared in the tangles of thoughts that she'd somehow managed to capture and wrangle into the letter that now weighed down the bag in her hand. When she'd signed that final draft at three o'clock that morning, she didn't think this would be where she would find herself now: ambling through the living room, the air of which hung thick with silent stillness; wandering alongside the dining room table, the ghosts of conversations past looming overhead; drifting into the kitchen alone with the wet from her sneakers squeaking over the floorboards.

But she'd made a mistake. She should have made it clear to Russell that she intended on seeing Henry later at home. She should have asked for Henry's new number, called him and let him know that she was back and that she wanted to talk. They should have sat down and had a rational conversation before either of them assumed that things between them would, or should, return to the way they had been before. Then they could have taken the time to figure out where they stood before either of them got hurt—again.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	88. Chapter Eighty-Six: the way he saw he

**Chapter Eighty-Six**

**…****the way he saw her.**

**Henry**

**5:35 PM**

All afternoon, Henry had felt like he was wading through a mud swamp of dread. In a way, it reminded him of those unbearable days and weeks after he'd given Elizabeth the hard truth—_If you go to Baghdad, I don't know what things will look like when you come back_. Each afternoon as the clock on the wall of his office at UVA had clunked its way closer and closer to the end of the working day, inevitably his thoughts would turn to what would be awaiting him at home. Would it be another night of wrangling the kids through dinner, bath, story and bed on his own before dialling Elizabeth's number at Langley every ten minutes until eventually someone—usually Conrad—picked up, only to say that she was working and couldn't come to the phone right now and it didn't look as though she'd make it back that evening either, or would it be another night of stewing in resentful silence where the only time she didn't outright blank him was when they were putting on a show in front of the kids?

At least back then he had understood what the problem was, and it hadn't come out of nowhere; after all, their arguments over her job had been building for years and they both knew it would come to a head at some point, especially after the events of Iraq. But today, her 'don't' had struck him like a train T-boning a truck on clear railway crossing. They had been doing fine before the poisoning. Better than fine. With the issue of Dmitri mostly behind them and with him having more time at home after quitting SAD, they had found a closeness similar to that of their early relationship, only—with all that life and understanding between them—so much richer: no longer exploring a new culture, but immersed in it and fluent in its native tongue.

Yet, when she should have smiled back at him and teased him for his cheesy line before kissing him and murmuring, 'I love you too', she had looked up at him with pain in her eyes and cut him off with a 'don't' before walking away and saying nothing more than, 'I'll talk to you at home'.

For a brief time, he tried to console himself with her parting words of 'I love you', but his mind only lured him down paths he'd rather not think about: I love you, but I'm no longer _in_ love with you; I love you, but I can no longer be with you; I love you, but things have changed, I've changed, I'm not the person who I was before.

Now, he found himself stood in the deep blue shadows of twilight that hung outside their front door, trapped in the amber haze of street lamps that reflected up off the quilt of snow and drifted like a mist at waist height, whilst the mud swamp of dread had thickened so much that he could barely take a step; it made the sludge on the sidewalks easy to trudge through in comparison. She was waiting inside, waiting for them to 'talk', or so said the three black SUVs parked along the snow-hugged kerb and the DS agents who had asked him to pass along the box of walnut muffins from that bakery on the corner—the ones stuffed with red bean paste that reminded her of those Korean things, _hodu-something-or-other_, the ones she loved but pretended she only bought because other people liked them, the ones her agents said came with one condition: _No more predawn runs_.

For weeks, he would have given anything to talk to her, but now… What if he didn't want to hear what she had to say?

Part of him wished he could stand outside forever, stuck not only in dread but in limbo, because just like in those endless minutes after he'd learnt that she had collapsed, when he was waiting to hear whether she was alive or not, there was some small comfort to be found in not knowing. Until the words were spoken and the executioner's blade had dropped, there was hope. Hope that his fears were wrong. Hope that when she said she wanted to 'talk', that meant she was at least prepared to listen as well.

* * *

With his hand wrapped around the edge of the cardboard bakery box and pinning it against his side, Henry eased the front door shut behind him. The soft click rang out through the silence that engulfed the house. He paused for a moment and listened.

Nothing, just the _clink…clonk…clink…clonk…clink…clonk…_ of the clock on the mantlepiece in the living room, the faint rattle of the central heating pipes reminding him that the radiators needed bleeding again, and the splosh of a car ploughing through the snow-sludge outside.

He toed off his wet-soled shoes—they tumbled with a thunk to the floorboards—and he padded through the shadow-thick lounge and dining room, towards the soft glow that emanated from the floor lamps in the den. The yellow light gave the room a subtle warmth, like the lingering heat of coal embers dying. He thought about calling out to her, but before he could, his throat closed around the sound. He wouldn't know what to say next anyway, something that wasn't monosyllabic, or hurt twisted into anger, or reasoning that verged on desperation. The thought of pointing out that a separation wouldn't play well in her bid for the White House had crossed his mind once or twice that afternoon. As had the question of whether he would consider a charade of marriage if it would help her career, and if it would buy him time to make her see sense, to win her over again. (…And to avoid having to tell his family, of course. Especially Maureen.) Though maybe she didn't want the presidency anymore either. In which case, what did she want?

Henry placed the cardboard box down on the kitchen table, in front of the chair where the bag he had packed for her all those weeks ago now sat. A heavy frown furrowed his brow at the sight of the two stuffed envelopes that lay on top of the bag, the upper one addressed to him in Elizabeth's cursive handwriting, the other one left blank. He picked them up and studied them for a moment, and then pivoted towards the stairs. He was about to call out her name when—

A snuffled snore came from the couch, followed by the rustling of a blanket.

His heart slammed into his ribs, and he spun around.

The _buh-boom, buh-boom, buh-boom _softened immediately though.

Elizabeth was snuggled into the cushions of the couch, both swathed in shadows and bathed in the glow from the lamps. The grey woollen blanket that usually draped over the back of the sofa now slipped down from her legs, whilst one of Alison's magazines splayed across her chest, and her reading glasses—frames askew—perched on the bridge of her nose. Her sneakers lay in a toppled heap next to the wall at the end.

He studied her, and as he did, he allowed himself a small, if pained, smile. She looked peaceful. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen her look peaceful while she slept. No pinch in the middle of her brow, no frantic flicker as her eyes jerked back and forth, no muscles tensing as though she were trying to rip herself free from her dream.

His smile faded into bitter. Maybe 'don't' was the price to pay for that. If so, he'd pay it again.

He placed the envelopes down on the armchair in the corner, opposite the couch, and shucked off his blazer and laid it over the back. He stooped over her, unhooked her reading glasses and lifted them away, as carefully as he would were he playing a buzz wire game. Then he folded in their plastic arms and set them on the footstool. The magazine he left, seeing as she hugged it to her chest, but the blanket he tucked around her before it could slide down and pool on the floor. In the shadow-tinged light, the gold of her rings gleamed atop the glossy cover of the magazine—another thing that made no sense. Why put them back on just to twist them around and around if she intended on taking them off again?

Or maybe that was just for show. A necessity in front of her DS agents, the White House staff, Conrad, Russell and Stevie.

But he couldn't believe she would do that. She might be an ex-spy and get a thrill from tradecraft, and she might partake in the occasional ruse at State, but she didn't do deceit when it came to their relationship.

Did she…?

Perhaps the only thing that hurt him more than the thought of that 'don't' and the fear that she might want to leave him was how the uncertainty of it all made him question his trust in her once again. He had hoped—had let himself believe—that once she returned home they would find their way back to the simplicity of his '_Always_' that followed her '_Trust me?_'.

Love could lull you into believing the impossible, though; love could blind you from undesirable truths.

He watched over her for a moment longer, and though the tug in his heart urged him to brush a kiss to her forehead and murmur, '_I love you_', he resisted and retreated to the armchair instead. He picked up the envelopes and sank down onto the cushioned seat. The reading glasses she had returned to him earlier now hid in the pocket of his blazer. He twisted around and retrieved them, and then swapped them with his regular specs. The dim light in the den would most likely strain his eyes, but he didn't want to wake her and—for now, at least—he didn't want to go anywhere else.

He slipped his thumb beneath the unsealed flap of the first envelope—the one addressed with a flourishing 'Henry'. A wad of five or six narrow-ruled A4 sheets, folded into thirds, was stuffed inside. He eased them out and smoothed away their creases, took one last look at her asleep on the couch and tried to fix in his mind the warmth he still felt for her now—despite the hurt and the fear—lest in a moment it might change, that the way he saw her might change, and then he stared down at the writing that flowed across page. The ink held her voice, and through her voice her words spoke to him.

* * *

Dear Henry,

On my first night here, I was told that I had to hand over my shoelaces. Of course, you were here with me, so you know that I had to hand over my watch and my rings and my belt too, but on reflection, it's the laces that have stuck with me and bothered me the most. Sure, it was degrading to be told I couldn't be trusted with something as basic as laces, and it was shameful because in all honesty I knew that the staff were right not to trust me, and it's just one example of the many ways in which I felt stripped and left as less than a person. (You think DS get a little overbearing at times? Try having someone never more than a pace away from you, sitting at the end of your bed while you sleep, and watching you while you take a shower.) But the degradation, the shame, the depersonalisation—they're not why handing over my laces bothered me so much.

I suppose the true reason it bothered me is because I never really thought about them before. Shoelaces are one of those things that you just don't think about. You take them for granted. You never imagine, or even think to imagine, that you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have them. Until, of course, they're taken away from you. And then you can't help but miss them. You're reminded of their absence with every single step, whether trying to walk in your sneakers without them or deciding to go barefoot because you're less likely to trip.

I'll leave you to draw the analogy with the loss of my parents and my loss of 'mental wellness'. Just another couple of things that I took for granted.

I like to think that one thing I don't take for granted is you.

The night I handed over my laces was the last time I saw you or spoke to you, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about you and talking about you since, this last week especially. I wanted to find the perfect way to explain why it is I ended up being here, to reassure you that I'm better now and that I won't get like that again, to prove to you that you can trust me even if you can't know what's going on inside my head, and to tell you how best you can support me going forward. There are several drafts of this letter written to that effect currently residing in my bin.

The more I thought about it, about all the things I wanted to say to you and all the things I would ask of you, the more I realised how unfair I was being on you and how what I would be giving you is less than the truth. Before I came here, I lied to you in many ways, and in others, I withheld the truth. You're a generous man, Henry McCord, and you see the best in me even when I don't, so I know you'll excuse the way that I acted as part of the struggles I've faced. But it doesn't change the fact that I did lie to you and I did withhold the truth.

Which then makes it seem awfully unfair that one of the key things I asked of you in those drafts was your trust. I wanted you to trust that I'm well and that I'll do everything in my power to stop this from happening again; I wanted you to trust me when I say that I'm okay, even if you have your concerns; I wanted you to trust me enough to know that you don't need to monitor me or try to protect me from myself. But I know that trust is a fragile thing, and after what I've put you through over the last couple of months, I don't know if that's something you'll be able or willing to give.

I think that what I wrote also failed to take account of your experience of this. Our journeys have been opposite and parallel in many ways. Maybe I'll never truly appreciate how my being here has affected you, but I saw the terror in your eyes the night I tried to tell you what I was thinking and you realised that I might hurt myself; I saw the pain and fear when you saw my answers to that questionnaire and you realised how bad it was; I saw the hurt and loss when you had to say goodbye to me, leave me here and face returning home alone and telling our children; and since then, I've heard how much you've struggled without me, how much you've missed me and how much you've feared for me while I've been gone. Given what happened to your father and how much his passing hurt you, and given that you were the one to find Ivan and all the guilt you felt around that, I can only begin to imagine how hard this must have been on you. If there's one thing I understand, it's loss and fear of loss. I never wanted to put you through that, and I would take it all back if I could.

But I can't. The most I can do is to give you the truth as best as I can now. These words are far from perfect, but you're a generous man, Henry McCord, so I'm sure you'll forgive me of that.

I have a dream. It comes back the same time every year—around the anniversary of my parents' crash—and whenever I'm worrying about Will. I have a dream. It's about running through a field at night, it's about being thrown to the cusp of an abyss, it's about a black walnut tree half lodged in the earth that I knew and half jutting over the darkness that I didn't. I have a dream. It's about clinging to that tree, it's about looking up to the stars above and down to the chasm below, it's about wondering what would happen to me if I were to let go. Would I fly or would I fall?

I have a dream. Only it isn't a dream.

It's a memory.

The evening that I learnt of my parents' crash, I had been sat on the front porch waiting for them to come home. I watched the top of the track that led towards the house, and I counted down the seconds as they passed. Ten seconds and I'd see the headlights of my father's car turning onto the track. Ten seconds and I'd hear the gravel beneath the tyres. Ten seconds and they'd be back. Ten more seconds. Just ten seconds more.

As I waited, I thought about all the places they might be, all the reasons why they might have left me there on my own. I thought maybe they had gone shopping. After all, Will was constantly getting into scraps at school or tearing his jeans on the barbed wire around the farm, so he was always in need of new clothes. I thought maybe they'd decided to go out for a pizza and make a full afternoon of it, rather than just the milkshakes that they'd planned. I thought maybe they'd gone to the movies. After all, Will was constantly pestering them to take us to the theatre more. The more I counted down the seconds and the more excuses I came up with, the angrier I became. I thought it was typical of them. Of course they were out having a great time together, they'd probably forgotten all about me, they'd always preferred Will. I felt stupid for sitting out there on the porch, in the dark, waiting for them to come home.

By the time the headlights finally turned onto the drive, I'd resolved not to speak to them for a whole week, to not so much as acknowledge them, to punish them for being so thoughtless and leaving me there on my own. I stood on the bottom step and waited for the car to pull up, still deciding exactly how I would play it to achieve maximal response. Though, of course, it wasn't my father's Buick that rolled to a stop on the track. You know that. You know how much the irony of those thoughts hurts me now. You know how this story goes.

The policeman didn't need to say it. The look in his eyes and his silence said it all. He tried to tell me a few times—if I close my eyes, I can still hear his voice, 'Miss Adams, Miss Adams, Miss Adams'—but I wouldn't listen. I didn't want to hear what he had to say. I didn't want to hear the words that would take away everything I knew.

And so I ran.

On the other side of the paddock there was a field that backed onto the old quarry. There used to be a fence there, but it had blown down in a storm. My father had never gotten around to fixing it; it was constantly second from top on his list of things to do. Right at the edge of the quarry there was a black walnut tree, its roots half grounded in the earth and half jutting out over the pit below. I don't know how exactly it happened—I must have tripped, maybe on a piece of the old fence, I don't know—but a moment later, I was at the brink of the drop, clinging to the tree trunk. I could hear Will shouting my name as he chased after me, I still can, and I remember looking at the stars above and the darkness below, and thinking what if I just stopped, what if I never had to hear those words, what if I let go—would I fly or would I fall?

I suppose what happens after death is a question that plagues most people at some point in their lives. Unfortunately, the dilemma I faced that night plagues many people too. Rather than continuing in a world where I would lose everything that I had ever known, I wanted to let go.

I think maybe I would have, if it weren't for Will.

He caught up to me at the edge of the quarry. I remember his fingers trembling and the look of absolute fear in his eyes as he begged me to take his hand. I don't think I've ever seen him so afraid in his life. I remember thinking that I could do it, I could leave this nightmare behind and let go. But at the same time I was thinking that if I did that, what would happen to Will? He would be alone in the world, no one to look after him, no one to protect him. He would have witnessed our parents die, come home, only for me to die too. I didn't want to take his hand. I didn't want to cross that cusp from my old life to this world where nothing was fair and nothing made sense and everything was this wasteland that somehow I'd have to navigate through. But I couldn't do that to him. So rather than doing what I wanted to do, I did what he needed me to do: I took his hand.

Like so much of the time around the crash, that night became a bad dream.

I don't know if I ever truly grieved their deaths. I guess the process is different for everyone, and the expectations of grief and loss were different back then than they are now. But I know this—looking after Will and dealing with his crises kept me going, it gave me a purpose, it pulled me through. Perhaps it's no surprise then that the prospect of losing Will now dredged up all these old feelings. The thought of losing him when I'd lived for him made me not want to live anymore. Some of those thoughts were on a subconscious level, some not so much.

I wanted to find the perfect way to explain to you why it is I ended up being here. This is far from perfect, but my hope is that in sharing it with you, it'll give you some insight into why I felt the way that I did. I also wanted you to know that it wasn't your fault.

Henry, I am not your fault.

I've never considered myself to be depressed, but over the past week I've been reflecting on how my parents' deaths impacted my life. I don't have a diagnosis, and I'm not sure that a label would help anyway, but I know that I have my melancholic moments, and my down days, and those times when I'm away with the horses. I've come to realise that, no matter what you want to call it, I do have this darkness inside of me. It crops up from time to time. Apparently, it can get out of hand.

Another thing I wanted to tell you in those original drafts was that I won't get like that again. But I can't. Because in truth—as much as believe that I'll be okay, and that if I'm not, I'll reach out—I just don't know. I don't know what's around the corner, or how I might react. None of us do. I promise I'll do my best to stay well, but I know that if I slip into that state of mind, all good intentions go out the window, and even if I recognise I need help, I might not want it. It's hard to fight for yourself when you've given up hope.

The final thing I wrote about in those drafts was how I wanted you to support me going forward. I wrote about how I'll need someone to lean on, to be my counterbalance, to warn me when I'm about to veer off course. I wrote about how I wanted you to support me but not stifle me, how I wanted you to help me but not overprotect me, how I wanted you to be the person I lean on but also to be my equal. But what I realised through writing those drafts was that I wasn't thinking about what you wanted or needed, and I wasn't treating you as my equal.

I have hurt you, Henry. I didn't mean to, but I did. And I can't promise that I won't hurt you again. In all likelihood, I will. I've thought a lot about what makes our marriage work and how we've made it this far. In the end, I think what it comes down to is this: trust, commitment, communication, intimacy and equality. And I think it's safe to say that most of those things have been tried, if not broken, over the past couple of months. We can rebuild them, we have before, but I guess—in a somewhat 'chicken or the egg' scenario—we also have to have them to start with if it's ever to work. This letter might help with some of those things, I hope it does, but so long as I'm making these demands of you in terms of what support I want and need without considering what you want or need, I'm not treating you as my equal. I guess that's what this letter is really about. It's about treating you as my equal and giving you a choice, because I know what it's like to be in a situation where you feel you have no choice.

After I left the CIA, you told me that I made it seem like staying with you and the kids was a moral obligation. You were right to call me out. I was making us both miserable. But it stemmed from me feeling like I didn't have a choice. I don't want to recreate a situation like that now. We've done duty. We've done resentment. It didn't work for either of us. I don't want you to feel forced into doing something you can't or just don't want to do, all because of the vows you made nearly thirty years ago. It's not fair of me to demand this support from you for my issues, especially when I know I have this thing inside of me, and perhaps I'll always be at risk, and I can't promise you that I won't hurt you again.

You're a good man, Henry McCord; it's one of the many reasons why I love you. The next few weeks are going to be tough, the next few years tougher still, and I know that you'll feel that it's your duty to stand by me and support me as my husband. But I don't want to be a burden or an obligation. You once asked me to tell you what I wanted—not what I thought I should say or what I felt obligated to say—but what I wanted, and you said that no matter what my response, you would understand. I'm asking the same of you now, and I'm telling you, I will understand.

You can open the second envelope now.

* * *

Henry's frown grew deeper and deeper as he stared down at the letter. He thumbed back through the pages—the ruffle of paper on paper lifted into the room and displaced the silence like the sound of shutters flapping in the night—and he read the words over and over and over again.

_…__I realised how unfair I was being on you…trust is a fragile thing…I don't know if that's something you'll be able or willing to give…I never wanted to put you through that…I have hurt you, Henry…And I can't promise that I won't hurt you again…It's about treating you as my equal and giving you a choice…I don't want you to feel forced into doing something you can't or just don't want to do, all because of the vows you made nearly thirty years ago…I know I have this thing inside of me…I can't promise you that I won't hurt you again…I will understand…_

He looked up at his wife, still fast asleep and curled into the cushions of the couch, the cuts that flecked her face and hands almost maroon in the dim light, her rings still very much in place and gleaming beneath the soft glow of the lamps. Her words from earlier that afternoon as they stood outside the Oval Office came back to him: _I didn't mean it like that…I just wanted to talk to you first_. The way she'd looked up at him with hope and a wince, the way her anxiety had crept through with a bite of her bottom lip, the way she'd cut him off because she hadn't spoken to him yet and given him '_the truth as best as I can_'.

If she was already anxious about handing him the letter and what his reaction might be, his less than warm welcome couldn't have helped. Perhaps she was worried about revealing the truth about her dream too, or maybe ashamed—if his eyes had been lit with fear and pain when he'd seen her answers to the questionnaire, hers had been a bomb blast of shame. More than anything, she seemed afraid that she might hurt him again, and that because of that, being with her might no longer be right for him nor what he wanted anymore.

_I know what it's like to be in a situation where you feel you have no choice…I don't want to recreate a situation like that now…I will understand._

Would he resent her for demanding support from him? Would it be easier to distance himself than to live with the fear that this might happen again? After all the worry, hurt and dread, after all the guilt, stress and living on a knife-edge over the past couple of months, was distance what he wanted, was that what was right for him?

He balanced the pages next to him on the cushion of the armchair, and then hooked his thumb under and lifted up the unsealed flap on the second envelope. He peered inside, and frowned. Then he turned the contents out into his palm. It was a simple friendship bracelet made with thick black and white threads. The past echoed out to him: _I think it's best for both of us if we stop now, before anyone gets hurt, and we can stick to being just friends instead_.

He grabbed the final page of the letter and turned it over to read the last little bit.

* * *

This is me embarrassing myself with a pathetic attempt at a romantic gesture. It's meant to be a bracelet. It took a shocking amount of help from an art therapist, and not an inconsiderable amount of concern. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's been written up in my notes. But given how much you've done for me over the last thirty years, from the right words at the right time to the thoughtful gifts big and small, I wanted to do something for you, and though I mean everything that I've just said and I promise you I will understand, in the interest of equality, I want to make my position perfectly clear:

Henry, I've come a long way without my laces, but I don't want to go anywhere without you.

Either way,

Yours always,

Elizabeth

* * *

Henry placed the final page of the letter down in his lap and looked at the bracelet again. _She'd made it? She'd made him a bracelet?_ Elizabeth and crafts went as hand in hand as…well, Elizabeth and cooking. But something niggled at the back of his mind, like a realisation trying to worm its way to the surface.

His gaze darted to the sneakers that formed a tumbled heap next to the wall at the end of the couch. Wiry, black dress shoe laces had replaced the flat, white laces she had removed from her shoes the night she had checked in at the clinic.

He held the bracelet up to the light that flooded out from the floor lamp, and studied it again.

Then it hit him.

A soft laugh escaped him. It left him winded

She'd made it out of her laces.

* * *

**Elizabeth**

**6:54 PM**

Something nudged Elizabeth's shoulder. Her eyes jolted open and she scrambled up to sitting, causing both the blanket that had been draped over her legs and the magazine that rested on her chest to spill over the edge of the couch and crash to the floor. "I'm awake, I'm awake."

The jaunty refrains of Christmas music—_What…Was that…'Christmas Wrapping'…?_—drifted through in the background. She blinked her vision into focus. White light blared from the suspended lamps in the kitchen; it melded with the yellow glow of the floor lamps in the den to pinprick her eyes with a sharp ache, until it felt as though the photons were blunt-tipped needles that gouged at her retinas. She pinched her eyes shut, and then attempted to prise them open again.

"You know it makes you look like a mole when you do that." Jason met her with an incredulous frown from where he perched next to Alison on the footstool.

Alison bunched her shoulders to her ears, a smile playing at the corner of her lips. "And people think it's the lizard people we need to be worried about."

Elizabeth swung her legs over the side of the couch, and all but flung herself at them. "My babies. Come here." She wrapped an arm around each of them. She pressed a kiss to Jason's cheek first and then to Alison's as they both huddled their arms tight to their chests, wrinkled their noses and tried to squirm away. She clung to them. "God, I missed you two so much."

Alison patted Elizabeth's shoulder. "We missed you too, Mom."

"But do you think you could not full-on assault us?" Jason leant away.

"I warned you not to prod the mama bear." Stevie's voice came with the uneven bounding of footsteps down the stairs. "At least you didn't get attacked in front of the president and your boss."

Elizabeth let go of Alison and Jason, and with her fists pressed into the cushion on either side of her, she twisted around to frown at Stevie, who leant her shoulder into the wall that cornered onto the kitchen as she sipped from a bottle of water. "I did not _attack_ you."

"Mom." Stevie raised her eyebrows at her and held the bottle poised in front of her lips. "You practically knocked me over. People were watching. And it was embarrassing."

"Embarrassing? I'll show you embarrassing," Elizabeth muttered. She turned back to face Alison and Jason, and her expression softened as she leant forward and laid her hands on their knees. "But how are you both? Everything all right?"

"We're good," Jason said with a nod, though his expression had turned a touch more hesitant. Then his lips drew into an anxious pout, and he chewed on the inside of his cheek. It looked as though he were daring himself to ask the question: "So…how are you?"

Elizabeth gave them a steady smile. "A few cuts and bruises, but I'm okay."

Jason's pout tightened. Something akin to fear gleamed in his eyes, and it made him look no more than ten years old again. "I meant…" He trailed off and ended the sentence with a shimmy of a shrug instead.

_Oh_. Elizabeth's smile faded a fraction, but she caught it before it could slip. _Honesty, patience and time_. She squeezed their knees. "I'm good." The words came out breathless. She turned her head from side to side, and set the ends of her hair quivering. "I know it might take a while for you to see it and believe it, but I'm doing well, feeling like myself again. And I'm sorry—"

But Jason shook his head. "You don't have to apologise."

Alison covered Elizabeth's hand, and gave her a warm smile. "We're just glad that you're home."

Elizabeth turned her hand over, caught hold of Alison's hand, and tangled their fingers together. She squeezed tight. "Me too."

Jason scooted to the front edge of the footstool and opened his arms to her. He gave her a proper hug this time, fleeting but fierce, and a kiss on the cheek too. "Love you, Mom."

"Love you too, baby." She clutched him for the moment that he was there, and ignored the dull ache that seeped out from her ribs. Then she welcomed Alison for a real hug as well. She wrapped her arms around her daughter, and as she pressed a kiss to the side of her head, just above her ear, she breathed in the scent of her tea tree and mint shampoo. "Love you, Noodle."

"Love you, Mom." Alison rubbed Elizabeth's back. "It's been too quiet here without you."

Elizabeth gave a 'hah' as she drew away. "Well, we'll see how long that sentiment lasts."

Stevie's cell phone pinged. She fumbled it out from the pocket of her burgundy sweatpants and glanced down at the lit-up screen. She clicked it off and stuffed it away again. "So, anyway…we ordered takeout. It's on the way, but delivery might be slow because of all the snow, so we thought we might decorate the tree until it gets here."

Jason braced himself against his knees and pushed himself up from the footstool. "Yeah, because that thing's just depressing."

Alison and Stevie both stared at their brother with looks somewhere between disbelief and thinly veiled panic as an anxious silence swept into the room and jittered through the air.

Alison lowered her voice to a hiss and swatted Jason as he clambered past. "Jay-son."

"What?" Jason scowled at Alison. But when her eyes widened until the whites flared and she gave an exaggerated sideways nudge of her gaze towards Elizabeth, his frown fell away and his gaze darted to their mother, a completely unveiled panic gripping his expression. "Oh, no, wait, I didn't mean…"

Elizabeth chuckled and held up one hand. "It's fine. Really." She rose to her feet. "It is a bit bleak, if you ask me." She stooped down and picked up the blanket and magazine from the floor. Her voice strained with the stretch. "And although I appreciate your sensitivity, you don't need to tiptoe around me. As I said, I'm good, and I'm happy to talk, if you want to talk." She dumped the magazine on the couch and then flung the blanket over the back of the cushions. "Any questions, and I'll try my best to answer them."

Alison and Jason led the way through the dining room and towards living room with its glow of wall sconces and Christmas tunes, their sock-muffled footsteps thumping off the floorboards. Alison whispered furiously at her brother and she jostled him with her elbow at least a couple of times. Elizabeth truly didn't mind the comment though; she wasn't made of glass, and God only knew Russell and Mike had said things far more offensive—and had meant them too—though their jibes were probably no more than a scratch compared to what some people would post on social media. Perhaps Carlos Morejon would get his 'Secretary of Unfit Mental State' hashtag after all. It would be a lie to say that it wouldn't bother her; after all, no one wanted to be lambasted in the court of public opinion, especially not over something so personal. But she would put on a brave face, and she would get over it. Those weren't the people whose opinions she cared about.

The tightness in her chest gathered again, like ropes taking up slack. She touched Stevie's elbow as they walked into the dining room. "Hey, have you heard from Dad at all?"

Stevie pulled a face, her lips downturned, and she shook her head. "He sent a message earlier. Something about some faculty meeting, said he'd be back late."

"Oh." Elizabeth's heart slumped, the ropes cut loose. She fought to keep it from her expression though, and mustered a smile instead, full of false cheer. "Well, nevermind. More takeout for us."

There was no faculty meeting though, not this close to Christmas, she knew that. Which only meant one thing: Henry would rather hide in his office at the War College, surrounded by musty old texts, than come home and speak to her. Not that she blamed him. It wasn't a conversation she was looking forward to either, especially not after their exchange at the White House, but that didn't change the fact that they needed to talk. Of course she hoped that after he read the letter and they'd talked it through, he'd want to stand by her, and that by her respecting him and giving him the freedom of that choice and the time to discuss and decide, there would be no feelings left unspoken or unacknowledged that would fester into resentment in the following months. She hoped that the letter would enable them to reconnect and would lay the foundations for their relationship going forward. But given that within minutes of seeing him, she'd managed to hurt him again, and given his response to her at the time and his absence now, she was growing less and less certain that his answer would be the one that she wanted. The only thing more cringeworthy than the bracelet she'd made for him would be if he were to reject the bracelet she'd for made him. But, if that was what he believed was best for him, she would understand. And she would put on a brave face, and she would pretend like she would get over it.

Jason dumped a cardboard box, which had 'Xmas Decorations' scrawled in black marker pen across the side, at the foot of the couch and then slumped down onto the cushions next to Alison, who had taken a seat in the middle. He stooped forward and folded back the flaps. Then he and Alison began sifting through the contents. The grating of strings of metallic beads running over one another, the jingle of bells rolling against the base, the whispered rustle of tinsel and the knocking of baubles weaved into the soft strains of '_Fairytale of New York_' that floated through the room from the speakers balanced on the mantlepiece. Every couple of seconds or so, Alison and Jason glanced up, as though checking on Elizabeth's progress in making it to the living room. Perhaps they were worried she might disappear again. She wished she could promise them she wouldn't.

Stevie skirted around the edge of the coffee table and joined them on the couch. Bags of salted popcorn and shiny apple-candy red cans of Manzanita Sol buried the glass top of the coffee table, a K2 of carbs and soda.

Elizabeth halted behind the armchairs and frowned down at the table for a long moment. Then she looked up at the kids on the couch. "What's all this?"

But the kids just stared back at her, the box of decorations now forgotten, whilst not so subtle smiles played on their lips. Then their gazes drifted over her shoulder, a little to her right, just as the floorboards creaked and—

"Apparently Slice was discontinued a while ago," Henry's voice came from behind her, "but I thought we could make do with a different brand of apple soda instead."

Elizabeth's heart lurched, and she spun around.

Henry stood next to the piano, presumably having emerged from the shadows of the pantry. His reading glasses hung from the neckline of his button-up shirt, but rather than him looking at her with that blank and lost expression as he had done when she'd returned the glasses to him earlier, he gave her a warm smile. "Hey."

Her mind continued to reel. _Henry, Slice, what the…?_

"Henry…" She clutched the back of the armchair, as though that might steady both her mind and herself. She pivoted to face the kids before she returned to him with a frown. "But…I thought…"

He eased a step closer, his smile twinkling in his eyes, and he gave a small shrug. "I asked the kids to be a little covert…but you're a generous woman, Elizabeth McCord, so I'm sure you'll forgive me of that."

The words struck her. _The letter. He'd read her letter. Oh God. This was so not what she'd planned_. Now would be the perfect time to drag him away so that they could talk—in private—but his hand disappeared into the back pocket of his jeans, and he pulled out a couple of sheets of wide-ruled notepaper that he'd folded into quarters. He unhooked his reading glasses, slipped them on, and then smoothed the creases out of the pages. Her stomach sank with a sicky feeling like it had done back when she was in middle school and her name had been called in assembly, and she had to rise from her seat on the floor, stumble and trip her way through the cross-legged masses, climb up all those rickety wooden steps onto the stage in front of the whole school who watched on in bated silence as they teemed below her, whilst she panicked in the uncertainty of whether she was about to be awarded something or publicly humiliated, the only surety being that either had the potential to be utterly mortifying. "Henry…what are you doing?"

But Henry didn't reply. Instead, he stood facing her, no more than a couple of paces away, and he stared down at the neat yet laboured handwriting that crawled along the lines of the page. "I know a girl who sat on my doorstep with a bag of popcorn and a can of apple Slice. She told me that her life was a chaotic mess of baggage, that she'd spend forever cleaning up after her younger brother, and that it would be best for both of us if we remained just friends.

"I know a girl who had an answer to everything and who was never afraid to speak up, yet she stayed silent when my family were unkind to her, and she turned the other cheek when they called her names." His gaze lifted to meet hers. It touched her soul. "She knew what it was like to lose her family and she didn't want me to give up mine for her sake."

He held her gaze for a moment longer, just long enough for the ache that strummed out from her heart to fade, and then he returned to the page. "I know a girl who forgave me for walking out on her for three, maybe five, days—the true length is still up for debate." At her 'hah', a smile lit his lips. "She said 'yes' when I came back and proposed to her, even though I'd hurt her, and even though half the letters were missing and I know she thought the skywriter was kinda lame."

"Hey, I never—" she began.

But he lifted one finger to his lips, concealing his smile, and when she bit her bottom lip and held to her silence, he continued. "I know a woman who stood by me while I was away on active duty, even though she faced the fear of losing me every second of every day. She showed me patience and compassion when I returned to her, even when I yelled at her about the milk—though it wasn't really about the milk—and she gave me the time that I needed to adjust and find my way."

The sheets of paper bowed away from his hands as he moved his grip to the bottom of the page. "I know a woman who was worried that she wouldn't make a good mother because she'd lost her own mother too young and she felt like she had no one to turn to during her pregnancy or those tough first days and weeks. She gave me three beautiful, intelligent, _weird_ children—" He shot their kids a funny look, causing her to laugh again, though as she did, her bruises stung like loss. "—she made me a father; and she inspired me to step up and become the man I am today."

With a flutter, he turned over the top page. "I know a woman who not only gave up the career that she loved for me and our family, but who gave up a home, a family of a different kind and a piece of herself. She deserved better than the words that I said to her, and I wish I could have found a different way to express my fears, but I'm grateful that she remained committed to us and that we worked our way through it, even if some small part of her will always resent me a little bit."

He paused for a second, his lips parted, and a frown pinched the middle of his brow. Behind his glasses, his eyes gleamed. "I know a woman who supported me and consoled me after the death of my mother and then my father. She listened to me when I was angry; she held me in her arms, she shielded me, she made me feel safe enough to cry; she talked me down from all my regrets and from my sense of guilt, and though I know that in helping me it forced her to revisit her own grief, she never once belittled my feelings or made it about herself.

"I know a woman who can get anxious about pretty much anything—our children, her brother, the world, our household appliances, whether our adult children have eaten enough, whether her brother is spending enough time with his family, whether her blazers make her shoulders look boxy, whether her job gives her too much masculine energy, whether our adult children are spending too much time at home, why our adult children aren't spending more time at home, whether I checked the back door before coming to bed, whether I double-checked the back door before coming to bed, whether I remembered to check the window before double-checking the back door before coming back to bed."

"I don't—" she began.

"Babe." He gave her _that_ look. After a three-second silence that felt more like three minutes, he returned his gaze to the page. "She obsesses because she cares and she seeks control because there was a time in her life when she had none, and though I can't say that I enjoy checking every window and door in the house at two AM—"

"So that's what that noise is," Alison cut in.

Henry smiled. "—she tells me that I'm her hero when I do eventually come back to bed, and I always enjoy the challenge of talking her down from the ledge."

He swapped the pages over, and his smile tinged with sorrow as he looked down at the second sheet. "I know a woman who sometimes forgets how to breathe. She thinks that makes her a burden that I'm forced to carry, but I feel privileged to be the who gets to hold her and to count each breath for her until she's ready to stand on her own again.

"I know a woman who has things in her past that are painful for her to talk about, some so painful that her mind has hidden them from her, some so painful that her mind makes her relive them again and again and again. She doesn't give in but she faces these fears, and although I wish I could take away her pain, I'm in awe of her strength and I'm grateful that I'm amongst the handful of people whom she trusts enough to confide in."

He moved his thumbs down the page, and his frown deepened further still, causing the pit of Elizabeth's stomach to tighten around nothing. "I know a woman who feels low sometimes—we call it her melancholic moments, her down days and those times when she's away with the horses. She tells me that she has this darkness inside of her, but even on her darkest days, she makes my world light up, and although I know it's not my job to make her happy, I'm grateful that I get to be the one to hold her hand until she feels better again.

"I know a woman who said 'don't' when I tried to tell her that I love her, because she was afraid I might get hurt if I didn't have the truth 'as best as she could give it' first. She thinks she should blame herself for the pain I've felt while she's been away, and my response to that is 'don't'—" He looked up at her with a stare so firm that it impressed the word on her mind. Then his gaze dipped back to the page. "—and although it's true that I'll always fear the day will come when I'll lose her, when it does, the memories I have of her will bring me comfort and bring me strength."

Tears had welled at the edges of Elizabeth's eyes, but she blotted them away with the cuff of her sleeve before they could gather into droplets and fall.

"I know a woman who wrote a letter about the importance of communication, commitment, intimacy, equality and trust. She opened up to me, she committed herself to me, she made herself vulnerable to me, she treated me like her equal, she gave me truth and honesty—" He met her eye again. "—and she always has my trust."

He held her gaze as he turned over the page. When he looked to the first paragraph, his expression softened, and at the hint of his smile, the pressure in her chest lifted. "I know a woman who thinks she can't do romance, but she gave me her heart in a bracelet, and as she did, she captured my heart all over again. She does that every day with her smile, her laugh, that time I found her shaking the toaster upside down over the sink because she didn't realise there was a crumb tray…" He grinned.

"Shut up." Elizabeth shoved his chest, only lightly, and her own grin sprang to her lips through the blur of tears whilst he chuckled and the kids laughed.

He caught hold of her hand, laced their fingers together, and looked her in the eye. "She doesn't know it, but every day, she captures my heart again and again and again."

He squeezed her hand, and when he returned his gaze to the page, he kept their fingers entwined. "I know a girl who sat on my doorstep with a bag of popcorn and a can of apple Slice. She told me that her life was a chaotic mess of baggage, that she'd spend forever cleaning up after her younger brother, and that it would be best for both of us if we remained just friends. Her life can be chaotic and, yes, she's a little neurotic, perhaps even more so than the day we first met, but I love her quirks and idiosyncrasies and that she's comfortable enough to be herself around me, and what she calls her baggage will never be my burden. She _has_ spent forever cleaning up after her brother, and I think I understand why their relationship is the way that it is, but even if I don't, her brother is part of our family, I consider him my brother too, and I will never resent her for wanting to look out for him. She definitely made the right choice that night when she agreed to go out with me again, though I'll admit that perhaps I'm a little biased, because she's more than just my friend—she's my best friend; my wife; my lover; the mother of my children; my past, present and future; my forever; my everything."

He reached behind him and placed the pages on top of the piano, followed by his reading glasses, and then he returned to her and took hold of her other hand too. He met her gaze, the hazel of his eyes never warmer, never kinder, never more like home. "I know a woman who asked me to tell her what I want, not what I think I should say or what I feel obligated to say, but what I want. And the answer is as simple now as it was back then. Her." He shrugged, and as his shoulders fell, he squeezed her hands. "I want her. She has things in her life that are painful, but I'll never want to be without her because of them."

Then he let go of her hands, unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt sleeve, and pushed up the fabric to reveal the black and white friendship bracelet she'd made tied around his wrist, just above the links of his watch. "I hope that makes my position perfectly clear."

She beamed up at him, on the brink of a laugh and tears. "Crystal."

"Good." He smiled back at her. "You still fascinate me, Elizabeth Adams, and I'm nowhere near done getting to know you." His smile widened. "And you can try and push me away—"

"But you'll get all stalker-y. Got it."

"Good." He held her eye for a long moment, still smiling at her. Then his gaze flitted to her lips, and his eyes darkened in a way that made her heart skip. He cupped her cheek, whilst his other hand found her waist with a firm yet tender grip and he drew her body into his so that his heat rolled over her and reminded her of sun-soaked evenings spent lounging on the porch trading sips of Merlot and languid kisses until both the alcohol and the gentle tide of his tongue made her body limp and her head spin, and as she nuzzled against the warmth of his palm, he swept his thumb over her cheekbone, once, twice, and then her breath hitched as he tilted her chin up and leant in.

Her eyes slipped shut, and she anchored herself by gripping the cotton of his shirt over his hips, her fingers curling into fists. After weeks of nothing but the lingering scent on his tee to breathe in, the rush of the spice in his cologne, the hint of sandalwood, the kick of black pepper and—beneath it all—just _him_ was overwhelming. She'd felt like she was drowning before, the night she'd said goodbye to him at the clinic, but right now, she wanted nothing more than to drown in him.

He nuzzled her nose, and the hot puff of his breath fell against her lips. She sensed the buzz of his smile like a tingle in the air, a frisson of static electricity, as his thumb resumed sweeping back and forth over her cheekbone, back and forth, back and forth, lulling her and luring her, reeling her in. He was so close she could almost taste him. Almost. Then his thumb stilled, and a wicked smirk thickened his tone like a rolling wave of dark honey as his words reverberated against the sensitive skin of her lips. "Is this okay?"

She yanked at his shirt. "Henry, I swear to God, if you start that ag—. _Mmmph_."

His lips crashed into hers and swallowed her words. Her hands leapt up to clutch at his neck, clawing and tangling, whilst his arms wrapped around her and pulled her flush to him. It felt as though every cell of her body melted into his until she wasn't quite sure where he began and she ended; the only thing she could be sure of was this—she couldn't care less, so long as everything was him. Her lips parted, and—

"Right," Jason said. "I'm out."

Cardboard chafed across the rug. Ornaments jangled and clinked. Footsteps thumped away.

Elizabeth's heart pounded into Henry's, so loud that it dulled the ache in her bruised ribs. Her fingers threaded through the soft strands of his hair, alternating between swirling fingertips over his scalp and gently tugging until she coaxed a moan that hummed through their lips. His hands slid down past her waist, hot and heavy, skimming the arch of her lower back, down, down, down—

"Guys." Stevie's voice was sharp with incredulity. "Can you at least try to keep it PG?"

"Yeah, Dad, quit mauling her," Alison said.

Henry laughed into the kiss and broke away. "I'm not mauling her."

But at the same time, Elizabeth turned to them and said, "I like it."

Stevie pulled a face. "Ugh… Gross."

Whilst Alison just stared up from the screen of her cell phone and gave them a look that said, '_Please tell me you did not just say that_.'

Footsteps padded through from the dining room, and Jason emerged with the house phone clutched in his hand. He nodded towards the door. "DS said takeout's here."

"I've got it." Both Alison and Stevie shouted at the same time, and they scrambled up from the couch and hurried towards the front door.

Jason stared after his sisters with a puzzled frown. Then his gaze lowered to where Henry's hands currently rested. His nose wrinkled, and he recoiled, turned on his heel and disappeared into the dining room. His mutter trailed after him. "And I'm gonna go get plates."

'_Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)_' drifted through the room from the speakers balanced on the mantlepiece. Elizabeth smiled up at Henry, her arms loosely linked around his neck, whilst her whole body still thrummed with his presence. "So…what are we having?"

Henry smoothed his hands up to settle in the curve of her back. "Chinese. The greasy kind."

"God I love you." The words tumbled out in a breath.

He chuckled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. The lightness that danced in his expression lifted her heart like a warm current buoys a balloon. "DS bought you some of those walnut and red bean muffins too, so there's that and ice cream for dessert. Though they did ask me to tell you that there'll be no more early morning runs."

She shrugged. "Suits me just fine."

He brushed his thumbs against her lower back through the cotton of her shirt, the touch soft and warming. His gaze dipped for a moment, and when he met her eye again, there was a raw sincerity there. "I want to support you, but I know there's a big difference between me saying that and actually making it happen, and there'll be plenty of things we need to figure out, so I was thinking, if it's something you'd be comfortable with and if it's something you'd want too, I'd like to come to one of your sessions with you so we can talk about what you'd find useful and what you won't, and we can talk about anything else that you want to talk to me about."

"Like the dream that wasn't a dream?"

"Anything at all."

She toyed with the hair at his nape. "I'd like that." She gave him a soft smile. "Thank you."

He smiled back at her. "You're welcome." Then he leant in and brushed his lips over hers again, the touch featherlight. "And welcome home."

* * *

**Henry**

**10:01 PM**

"Well, that felt like a mix between '_This is Your Life_' and '_2 Minute Drill_', and my diary's never been so full." The bathroom light clicked off, the background hum cut out, and Elizabeth's footsteps padded through to their bedroom. The soft thump of each step against the floorboards said that her feet were bare. "Do you think it would be okay if I asked Blake to organise my personal life too? I mean, he is my _personal_ assistant, after all, so surely that's gotta be within his remit."

Henry chuckled. He slotted the book he had been pretending to peruse—_The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature_—back onto the bookshelf, and he pressed on its glossy orange spine until it slid into line with its neighbours.

The kids had taken his advice to make the most of their parents to heart, and they had spent all of dinnertime and all of the hour or so that they devoted to decorating the Christmas tree afterwards quizzing Elizabeth about the clinic, the CIA, her childhood…—everything was fair game in their smorgasbord of personal trivia, and for the most part, Elizabeth had indulged them. They had jostled with one another to arrange brunches, last minute Christmas shopping sprees, and movie nights with her too. (The movie nights were somewhat of a necessity, given that the cupboards in the pantry were now stuffed full of enough bags of popcorn and cans of apple soda to last them through the winter.)

Whilst the kids had bombarded their mother with their questions, Henry had enjoyed the simplicity of his own silence. Or, more accurately, he had enjoyed listening to the life in Elizabeth's voice as she talked, seeing the way her whole body lit up with each gesture, and hearing that touch of grit in her laughter. He had enjoyed the way she kept one hand on his knee beneath the table throughout dinner, the way she turned to him every other minute or so with a smile that felt as though it had been crafted just for him, and the way she snuggled into his chest as they curled up on the couch in the living room and directed the kids in hanging the ornaments from the tree. And more than anything, he had enjoyed how every so often she would look up at him, quirk an eyebrow, and coax him in for a gentle kiss.

The pad of footsteps neared, and he turned his chin to his shoulder, just in time to catch a glimpse of her ambling towards him, now wearing a pair of indigo plaid pyjama bottoms and the faded National War College tee he had given her on her first night at the clinic. The t-shirt was far too big on her, and it looked perfect. "You know you love it really."

"I do." Her voice turned wistful. She gave a short sigh. Then she wrapped her arms around him from behind and peppered kisses between his shoulder blades before breathing in a lungful of him and then resting her cheek against his back, just below the base of his neck.

The supple warmth of her body melted through him, and his eyes slipped shut. The tide of her breath rose against him and gave life to his inhale. It made him wonder how he had ever breathed without her, and at the same time, it reminded him that one day the time would come…

He tried to push the thought aside before its bitter ache could grip him again, but it lurked at the periphery, a wheeling vulture, ready to sweep in. He rubbed her wrists where they crossed in front of his stomach and then smoothed his hands up her arms, until his palm met jagged snags of—

She flinched, and her hold loosened.

His eyes snapped open, and he twisted around to face her as her arms fell away to her sides. A heavy frown gripped his brow. "What happened to your arm?"

A cut ran from just below her elbow to more than a third of the way along her right forearm, the margins of the scarlet line held together by twenty or so blue-threaded stitches.

"Oh, that?" She peered down at it as though she hadn't noticed it before, and then she looked up at him again and gave him a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. "Just glass from the explosion. Will patched it up for me though."

His frown deepened. Incredulity stained his tone. "You let your brother stitch up your arm?"

Her smile vanished. Her jaw tensed, and her chin jutted slightly to one side. "Well, he is a doctor, Henry. It's not like I let an accountant loose with a needle on my arm."

His eyes widened. "Even so. Siblings don't sew up other siblings' arms."

She hugged her arms across her chest, and her whole body shrank back from him whilst her gaze sharpened. The look in her eyes and her stance told him it would have been wise to quit this conversation before it had even begun. "You let _our_ daughter—" Her hand chopped the air to the left of her. "—date _my_ doctor—" Her hand chopped the air to the right of her. "—not to mention letting her yell at the Vice President of the United States about 'saving the freaking orphans'—" She tossed her hand up, her fingers spiked. "—so now not only do I get to enjoy the mortifyingly awkward conversation that is bound to ensue when she decides to invite her new boyfriend to a family dinner, but I'm going to have to suck up to Teresa Hurst the next time I bump into her at the White House or try and pretend like the whole thing never happened. And don't even get me started on you getting into an argument over me with Maureen. I mean, _Hen_-ry, I know that I left you in the lurch, but do you think—"

At the smile that blossomed on his lips during her rant, she stopped. The pinch in her brow tightened. "What?"

He stepped towards her, bringing them toe to toe, and as she gave him a somewhat suspicious look—apparently a smile was not the response she had been anticipating—he ran his hands up and down her upper arms and then massaged her shoulders. He relished the feel of her and the fact that she was here and he could touch her, even if she was ranting at him. Perhaps even relished the fact that she was ranting at him. "I'm just glad that you're you again."

She stared at him. Puzzled.

Then her frown collapsed in an instant, and her head bowed as she gave a soft huff of a laugh. When she looked up at him again, light danced in her eyes, and her voice softened. "Me too." She rested her hands against his waist, and as she plucked at his tee, her fingers and thumbs fumbling over the cotton, she swayed her hips into his and her gaze settled on his chest, just below the neckline of his t-shirt. "So, I was thinking…seeing as how I _am_ me again and I'm here, and seeing as how you're here and you're you, and given that I'm not tired yet seeing as someone left me to nap all afternoon…maybe we could pick up where we left off earlier before the kids interrupted us, and we could kiss and cuddle for a bit?"

He arched his eyebrows at her, his lips twisted with a smirk. "Kiss and cuddle?"

"Kiss…cuddle…" Her shoulders rose in a shrug that didn't fall, and as she shook her head, the ends of her hair quivered around the line of her jaw and the silky strands caught shimmers of light. "…and if somehow I were to end up wearing nothing but your tee and if somehow you were to end up wearing nothing but my bracelet, then so be it." She stilled and her gaze flicked up to meet his. The glimmer in her eyes was all innocence and utterly sinful.

The thud of his heart trampled out all coherent thought. "God, I've missed you."

"Good." She grinned. Then she stretched up onto tiptoe, still clinging to his tee at his waist, and she leant in. With her chest pressed against his, her breath fanned hot across his cheek and her throaty whisper unfurled into the shell of his ear, causing a shiver to ripple up his spine and ignite every last nerve end. "I want you to hold me. I want you to touch me. I want to feel your skin on mine. I want you to kiss me. I want you to make love to me. Then I want you to—"

His head swam. It felt as though the fog of white light from the bedside lamps had seeped into his mind and left all his thoughts thick and hazy. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. "Well, for someone who claims she's not a fan of monosyllabic words, you sure know how to use them."

She laughed. That laugh that he loved—the one with a little snort at the beginning, the one that made his chest swell with a rush of warmth. Her hips arched further into him as she leant her upper body back just enough that she could smile up at him and bring her palms to rest against his chest. Her fingertips fluttered. "That's going to become a thing now, isn't it?"

He gave a small shrug, his lips downturning in sync, whilst his thumbs rubbed over her lower back through her tee as he held her against him. "Possibly."

She studied him, a slight flicker to her gaze, and as she did, the light in her eyes dimmed a fraction, like a breeze had swept in and blown out a single line of votives one by one. Then her smile withered too. Her chin dipped, causing her hair to sway forward. She shook her head. "Henry…I'm sorry. I should have—"

"Don't." He tilted her chin up, and looked her hard in the eye. He wanted to impress it on her mind. No more guilt. No more blame. Not now.

She paused for a moment—three seconds, maybe more—and then yielded a nod. She cracked a smile. It was only weak though. "I guess that's going to become a thing too."

"Not if you don't want it to." He tucked her hair behind her ear. All those years on and the strands still made silk feel coarse in comparison. He had learnt since then that her skin did too. The tract on the inside of her upper arm, the curve of her throat, the expanse of her inner thighs.

She stared up at him as his fingertips lingered over the strands. It looked as though she were seeking something from the depth of his eyes. Then the words poured out in a rush of breath; it gave them a certain vitality, a truth. "I love you."

"Good." He smirked. "Because I'm kinda fond of you too." Then his smile softened into sincerity. He brushed his thumb over the sweep of her cheekbone, and drew her up to meet him as he leant in and grazed her lips with his. "I love you."

When he deepened the kiss, she slid her hands up and tangled her fingers through his hair. She pulled him down against her lips and tugged at the strands, eliciting a sweet sting that heightened the throb of his pulse, whilst her chest crushed into his. Her lips parted, their tongues touched, and she gave a mix between a sigh and a humming sound.

But no sooner had the reverberation buzzed through him and scrambled all his thoughts again until the only thing left certain in the world was _her_ than she drew back.

With a wicked smile, she raised her eyebrows at him, hooked her finger over the neckline of his tee and plucked at it so that it pinged against him. "Now, come to bed."

She took a step back, and then turned on her heel and sauntered away.

He blinked. Dazed. "Yes, ma'am."

At her laugh, he snapped back into focus and he looked to her, just as she reached the burnt-orange bench at the end of their bed. The white light from the bedside lamp framed her with its halo. But it cast shadows around her too, and the warmth that had overwhelmed him just a second before drained away as all those midnights and mornings when he had awoken to icy sheets and nothing but her scent, once so comforting but now a cruel reminder of her absence, flickered through his mind.

His mouth hinged open, and then closed.

He swallowed, his throat tight.

The words stumbled out, too thick and too heavy for the weightlessness of moments before. "Promise me you'll still be here when I wake up."

She stopped. When she turned to him, her smile had fled. She mustered a new one, though it was less playful, more bitter than before. "I promise I'll try my best."

Because no one knew what was around the corner, or where they would find themselves come the dawn. And a promise was not a truth, but an intent, and perhaps that they both tried their best was all that he could ask for. Hadn't it served them well so far?

She held out her hand. Her fingers thirsted for his.

He couldn't know where tomorrow would take them or when he'd find himself confronted with the prospect of life without her again. All he knew was this: No great height would ever be reached without the fear of falling.

And for her, he would fall time and time and time again.

And so he trusted himself to her and to that fear. He stepped towards her, his fingers outstretched. He took her hand.

* * *

**Thank you for reading!**


	89. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

**Elizabeth**

**Saturday, 22nd December, 2018**

**7:35 AM**

A memory is more than just a memory. It is our truth; it is our understanding; it is our version of the past; it is susceptible to change; it influences our thoughts, actions and feelings; it can transport us to a different time and place; it is part of the 'I' that makes you 'you' and me 'me'; it clouds the lens through which we see the world; it shapes the way in which you and I relate; it is our bias and our guide; if we're one of the lucky ones, it lives on after we fade; it is a comfort when we're missing home; it is the wire through which past, present and future communicate; it is a pattern of neuronal firing; it offers solace when we've lost the people who made home more than just a place; it is something we take for granted; it is the jolt of that scent, the 'didn't I see that before?', the reason why I can't stand that taste; it can hurt us when it comes unwanted; it can hurt us when it deteriorates. A memory is more than just a memory. It is a ripple beneath our surface. And from small ripples come tidal waves.

The world outside had stopped. It had succumbed to snow's sweet blanket of sleep. In the still and silent hush, the milky-bright light of sunrise reflected up and flooded through the net curtains of their bedroom. It spilled across the floor and flowed up to engulf them where they lay, their legs entangled beneath the covers, his chest a wall of warmth pressed to her back, his breath a ruffle that tickled her neck at its nape. In that instant, no one else existed. It was just them. Elizabeth and Henry. Henry and Elizabeth. She wanted time outside to freeze forever so that the moment would never fade.

Beneath her tee, his fingertips traced idle circles over her stomach, and the ties at the end of his bracelet dragged behind his touch to caress her skin again. His tee. Her bracelet. She smiled to herself as she recalled every stroke, nip, plea, moan and kiss, every stream of '_I love you, I love you, I love you_' that had tumbled from their lips. And perhaps he sensed her smile, because his own smile curled against her skin as he nuzzled the base of her neck and his lips sought out fresh flesh to tease and claim as his.

Perched on the window ledge outside, a bluebird warbled and reminded them that they couldn't stay forever in this fug of snug warmth, entwined bodies and uncomplicated bliss.

Her smile widened as a thought came to her from some distant echo of the past. Her mouth opened. She paused. Then the words rushed out with her breath. "Well, if that's what I get for leaving you high and dry for eight-and-a-half weeks…"

His laugh erupted from him, raw and uninhibited, and his whole body shook against hers whilst he pressed his forehead to the back of her neck. The chuckle reverberated through her and melded with her own. Hot tears dampened her skin. There had been plenty of those last night too, some a relief, some a release, some not entirely welcome. He had kissed away hers and she had kissed away his—just like he kissed better every scratch, cut and bruise—and in doing so, they had tended to each other's less visible wounds.

She rolled over to face him. The warmth of his smile said that they were happy tears this time, but she cupped his cheek, mindful of her stitches, and swept aside the glistening tracks with the pad of her thumb anyway. She held him there. "Good morning, handsome."

"Good morning, beautiful." He nuzzled into her palm and pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist, making her pulse flutter beneath. "How did you sleep?"

"After last night?" She raised her eyebrows at him.

They shared a grin, whilst the hint of a blush flushed Henry's cheeks.

He slipped his hand free from beneath her t-shirt and from beneath the floral quilt that nestled around them and held their body heat in, and he tucked her hair behind her ear.

But as he did, it revealed the black and white friendship bracelet tied around his wrist, and her neck tensed with a cringe. She caught hold of his wrist and held it up so she could study the bracelet in the unforgivingly bright deluge of snow-light. The cringe spread along her jaw, until it felt as though she were biting down on cotton wool. "God, Henry, that really is awful."

He chuckled, and prised his wrist free from her grasp. He settled his hand against the small of her back beneath the covers again and gathered her against him. He leant in and kissed the tip of her nose. "I love it, and I love you."

She stared at him, her eyes wide, her eyebrows raised. "Please tell me you're not actually planning on wearing it. In public? Where people can see it?"

"I'm never taking it off."

"But it's an embarrassment." Her voice shot up, and she scrambled to sitting, keeping the covers tucked around her bare legs. "If ever you needed proof as to why it's in both our interests—in more ways than one—that on birthdays, Valentine's and Christmas, I stick to lingerie and sexual favours, then this is it." She gestured to his wrist where it now rested on the mattress between them.

He laughed—not the response she had wanted. Then he eased himself up to sitting and rested back against the headboard, though the coolness of the faux-leather and the chill in the air must have nipped at his bare skin.

Her voice softened again. She stroked his cheek, the hint of stubble prickling beneath her touch, and she tried to fight back her wince. "Can't you just wear it in here? Keep it for us?"

"I love it. And I'm not taking it off—"

She opened her mouth to protest.

"But…" He shot her a firm look, and only when her lips drew into a bud and she held to a reluctant silence did he continue. "If it makes you feel better, I'll wear it around my ankle instead."

She paused. _That could work_. "Beneath your sock?"

He gave her a gentle smile. "Beneath my sock."

"Thank you." She gripped his hand atop the covers, and when he turned it over so that they were palm to palm, she linked their fingers together. Her gold anchor ring aligned with his wedding ring. Her gaze drifted down as she rubbed her thumb back and forth along the edge of his.

_Fly or fall? Take my hand._ Thirty-five years on and she found herself on the cusp once again, old life and new, though this time the step into the unknown would see her giving up the life they'd forged for themselves over the past four years in DC along with the role she'd somehow come to love at State and risking everything in a run for the presidency. Perhaps she would never fully reconcile with that part of her that called her selfish for wanting it, not whilst knowing the scrutiny her family would go through in her bid for the election and the pressure it would place on all of their relationships, but she did want it. Call it idealistic, but she believed that maybe she could make a difference, maybe she could effect true change in the world, and maybe one day they'd all benefit from it. But more than anything, she wanted it. And if she didn't at least give it a shot, she'd forever regret it. It would be a new path, a new 'one step at a time', a whole new world of experience.

She tugged at Henry's fingers and looked up at him. Her gaze locked on his. "So…are you ready to go out there, face the world, and make some new memories with me?"

His smile played at the corner of his lips, and his gaze dipped. When he looked up at her again, his eyes gleamed. "You're going to make more than just memories, Elizabeth Adams McCord, you are going to make history." He squeezed her hand, clung tight, tighter than tight. "And no matter what, I'll be with you every step of the way."

**The End;**


	90. Writer's Note 2

Dear Reader,

Firstly, a huge thank you for reading this story. Secondly, an even bigger thank you if you've taken the time to leave comments/reviews, both on the site and on Twitter. Your support whilst I've been posting (and continuing to edit) this piece has meant so much to me.

Speaking of comments/reviews… I'm keen to improve as a writer, so I'd welcome any constructive feedback you have on this piece: what you liked, what you disliked, what you would change… Any thoughts at all. And if you have any questions or ever want to discuss elements of the story, by all means, please get in touch.

I guess one of those questions might be why I decided to end the story at this point. Although the story would most certainly continue from here, as there would be a lot of aftermath to explore, I felt like this was the appropriate end point because the major arcs of the story were complete. I think it would be interesting to see how Elizabeth would settle back into her normal routine at home and at State, how Henry and the kids would adjust to Elizabeth coming back home and how they would broach the issues she's faced, and how the media and public would react. There would be plenty of challenges, that's for sure, but those would be new arcs, deserving of a separate story using the events of this story as a starting point.

One of the major themes of this story is mental health. It's a topic that I visit a lot in my writing, and I think it's a topic that needs to be discussed, both in real life and through fiction. I'm grateful that I was able to write about mental health using these characters, because the show means so much to me personally. I hope that my love for the show and for the characters has come across in this piece, and though I never want my stories to become a lecture on any topic, I hope that it has made you think—even just a little bit—about mental health.

I had a whole list of things that I wanted to achieve when I first set out to write this piece. I don't know if I've achieved them, all I know is that if I were given the opportunity to start again from scratch, it would most likely be a very different (and hopefully improved) story. Regardless of whether I achieved my goals or not, I hope that you've enjoyed reading this piece and that it has entertained you—and possibly even moved you. More than anything, I hope that it's a story you'll want to return to again and again. If you do reread it, I hope that you find a new depth of meaning each time and perhaps spot some of the things hidden throughout. I'd be interested to hear what you think and what new things you pick up on each time, so please do review again!

Once again, thank you for reading.

P.S. The jumping off point for this story was 'Survivor's guilt'.


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